Let’s make one thing absolutely clear: For someone working solo, or even for the office of four people, PowerTalk is generally inappropriate. It’s got much bigger aspirations in mind — connecting, as in our example earlier, associates scattered across the global network. We’ll try to make some sense of it here, but keep in mind that PowerTalk is extremely complex; its designers made the assumption that a full-time network administrator would be on hand to set things up and guide you past the rough spots.
And by the way: A dedicated wiring weenie isn’t all you need before PowerTalk makes your network a nirvana. You also have to wait until software companies upgrade their network, e-mail, fax, and telecom programs to make them PowerTalk savvy. In WordPerfect, ClarisWorks, and others, for example, after typing something, you can mail it to a PowerTalk-connected recipient without ever leaving the program.
Sharing nicely
There are two ways to work with PowerTalk: with or without a PowerShare server, a Mac dedicated to handling the file traffic generated by you and your fellow networkers. (It may be the server Mac that you’re already using — as an e-mail server, for example.)
The advantage of a PowerShare server is that, because you never turn it off, it can store anything you mail to a Mac that’s currently turned off. When the recipient finally shows up for work and turns on his or her Mac, the server will automatically shunt your file over.
Again, you can use PowerTalk perfectly well without having a dedicated server — you’ll just have to accept that the files you send won’t necessarily be delivered the moment you send them.
All that PowerTalk clutter
When you install PowerTalk system software (by running the PowerTalk Installer), you’ll see significant changes in the look of your desktop. At the upper-right corner, under your hard drive icon, you’ll see, for example, the Mailbox and Catalogs icons.
After you’ve set up PowerTalk, the Mailbox icon will take on your name — a more exciting prospect than calling yourself Mailbox forever. This mailbox has both In and Out trays; you’ll see your own incoming mail there, and, if necessary, you can store items in the Out tray.
If you double-click the Catalogs, you’ll see icons representing the services you’re set up to use, such as other hard drives on your network.
The key to it all
The idea behind PowerTalk is to provide a standard, simplified front end to all kinds of different networked machines and services: e-mail, online services, other hard drives,
CD-ROM-based directories, big humming mainframes, and so on. As you may have discovered on your own, one hazard of today’s computer-drenched lifestyle is that you’re asked for another password at every turn: a password apiece for America Online, QuickMail, each disk on your network, your Internet account, and so on.
The great idea behind the PowerTalk Key Chain is that you only have to enter all of those name-and-password sets once for each of those services — and then you give one master password to the entire Key Chain (see Figure 32-30). From now on, you only have to remember that one master password. You type it when you want to access any of those network services; PowerTalk provides the correct individual password to the service automatically and invisibly.
Passwords are case sensitive in this system (david is not the same as davID) and Apple encourages you to think up nonobvious passwords that include nonletter characters (%,*, #, and so forth).
After you answer the questions in these dialog boxes, you’ll have a new PowerTalk Key Chain icon on the desktop, and the mailbox will at last show your name.
To add or remove services, double-click the Key Chain icon, and you’ll see the dialog box in Figure 32-32. Your network administrator can tell you which services are available and how to set them up. For example, if your administrator buys the pair of programs called Mail*Link SMTP for PowerShare and Mail*Link for PowerShare MS (StarNine, 510-649-4949), you’ll be able to send mail to addresses on the Internet using Microsoft Mail. All the complicated communications connections will be fired up when you drag your expense report onto the icon representing Fred in accounting (at his Internet address!) — but you won’t even be aware that you’re using Internet mail.
Those StarNine programs that act as bridges between PowerTalk and various e-mail services are known as gateway programs. You need one for each service with which you hope to connect via PowerTalk. You can buy gateways for CompuServe, most office e-mail programs, and (soon) even America Online.
By the way, because your 245 different passwords are now entered automatically whenever you use a network or telecom service, it may occur to you that your Mac is now something of a security risk. If you go to lunch, any merry prankster in your office could theoretically sit right down at your vacated desk and start sending messages all over the planet — with your name on them.
That explains the presence of the Lock Key Chain command in your Special menu. Choose it when you’re going to be away from your Mac.
Totally wired
After you’ve dealt with the Key Chain, you’re now ready to enjoy all the goodies in PowerTalk. PowerTalk will connect your Mac to the rest of the world at a new level of convenience. For example, if you open the PowerTalk folder and double-click the Info Card icon, you see a"business card" to fill in.
You can fill out an information card like this and put it in your AppleTalk catalog (double-click the Catalogs icon on the Desktop and drag the card to the AppleTalk icon), for example, so that other people on your part of the network will know all about you.
The Catalogs could have been called Phone Book because it’s the database of people you can contact (along with tags of personal or business information about them). But depending on what PowerTalk-savvy software you’ve bought, individual items in the Catalogs could also represent a group of people, an entire company, a shared disk, or, for example, a CD-ROM disc that contains the listings from every white pages in the country.
Files all over
You can now pull icons (representing people) from your AppleTalk, PowerShare, or Direct Dialup catalogs, and, if you like, put them on the Desktop. When you drag any Mac document to one of those icons, you can consider it mailed.
PowerTalk for power users
There’s more to PowerTalk; the PowerTalk manual is 160 pages long (and believe us — that’s still not enough to explain it). Here are some topics that await your further exploration, either in the horrid manual or with the help of your hapless network administrator:
•Digital signatures: A digital signature doesn’t look anything like a signature. In fact, you can’t see it at all; it’s a deep-seated, behind-the-scenes computer code that the Mac assigns to any document you create. When the document arrives at its destination, your PowerTalk-equipped recipient can tell whether or not you really sent it and whether or not it’s been tampered with since you sent it.
The process for getting an official digital signature is a tad convoluted — it involves printing a form, taking it to a notary public, and so on — but the end result is a piece of data (a signer) that’s as legally valid as your personal signature. Once again, Apple paves the way for the digital age.
• AppleMail: That Mailbox icon on your desktop doesn’t actually let you read any mail displayed there; for that, you have to have a PowerTalk-savvy program. While waiting for software companies to produce said programs, you can use AppleMail as a rudimentary e-mail system.
• AOCE: The acronym stands for Apple Open Collaboration Environment, an elaborate set of system-software enhancements designed for networks of the future (by Taligent, an Apple spin-off company). PowerTalk is only the first panel in the AOCE quilt; more, we’re told, is on the way.
