Designed to provide a communications base on your PC running under Windows (95, 98 or NT), Communicate! Pro is a powerful, richly featured centre that easily organises virtually all aspects of communication with the world outside. In normal operation, the Communicate! Pro centre sits on the screen as an icon. Stirred into life by a mouse click, this icon will expand into a screen object that looks realistically like a telephone board, complete with telephone handset, pad of dial buttons and auxiliary buttons for special functions. In addition there are "shelves": one for fax and data, one for Internet access and one for general telephony (speakerphone, pager, answerphone, broadcast voice mail and so on).
The various functions available through this package are easy to learn. Not only can fax messages be composed, sent and retrieved, but total management is provided. Telephone calls can be made automatically or manually, or received, switched, paused and even recorded from this centre--and you can efficiently handle voicemail without any additional hardware.
The Contact Manager allows users to maintain several independent phone books, searching and dialling from among them according to any desired criteria (for example, contacting fellow club members about a meeting). An excellent softback user's guide (250 pages) supplies details of all the operations available with this package, well illustrated and indexed for ease of reference. --Wilf Hey
