If you are selling electronic payment processing systems you have probably come across opportunities to sell software, but were hesitant to because of a bad experience getting software set up. The problem was undoubtedly due to the modem, and the reason is quite simple, most modems today have been designed to surf the Internet at 56K and their default settings are set accordingly. Unfortunately, the financial services industry has not updated their modems and require the modem to connect at 300-1200 baud with no data compression or error correction. If the modem does not connect at these settings, the transaction will not go through. The old way of telling the modem to conform to these settings was to build a modem initialization string with commands that tell the modem how it should operate. The problem is that there are no standard commands for the many different types of modems and so it turns into a trial and error process to get the right initialization string for the modem to work.
Microsoftís industry standard, TAPI, comes to the rescue. TAPI, which stands for Telephone Application Programming Interface, provides a programmable interface between Windows and the modem. Letting Windows and the modem deal with the details of how they work together relieves the user of this burden. With TAPI, setting up modems becomes a matter of simply selecting the modem from a list of modems installed on the system. No knowledge of COM ports, IRQs, initialization strings, etc. is required to use TAPI-enabled software. In addition, TAPI lets multiple applications share one device eliminating potential conflicts and making the PC more productive. For example, fax software can run at the same time that the system is processing payment transactions.
GO Softwareís latest PC-Charge, (win-Charge and active-Charge) products are the first payment software that we know of to use TAPI and early indications are that they can greatly simplify the installation and setup processes. So the next time your client is looking for software, check out GO Software at (800) 725-9264 or www.gosoftinc.com.
