OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

If you are like my organization, you have clear policies on how to destruct your PC and server hard drives after they have run their useful lives. But have you thought about the implications of sensitive data stored on fax machines, photocopiers and printers?

Last week, the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) issued guidance on mitigating risks posed by information stored on fax machines, photocopiers and printers. Financial institutions regularly use these machines to process financial transactions, loan documents and other business information. These documents often contain confidential customer information.

The FDIC is concerned that when these devices are disposed of, there is a risk that confidential data may be compromised if the devices hard drives and flash memories are not destroyed, encrypted or erased. They are recommending that financial institutions be aware of the risks posed by these devices and implement appropriate processes and procedures to mitigate the data loss at the time of disposal of these machines.

One way financial institutions can eliminate this risk is to replace their fax machines with a fax server. Fax servers can do far more than just replace fax machines. Not only do they provide an audit trail of what has been sent and received, they can integrate with MFPs and be leveraged by back-end business applications. Users can send and receive faxes from their email inbox and faxes can be routed as part of a work flow (business process).

By using a fax server, the need for fax machines and their associated security risks are eliminated. Of course, with a fax server one still needs to have an appropriate server hard drive data retention and destruction policy but one reduces the risk from many fax machines to a single server.

Replacing a company’s fax machines with a fax server has been proven to reduce costs and eliminate paper waste. According to Gartner, a world leading information technology research and advisory company, businesses can reduce faxing costs by as much as 50% by using a fax server rather than stand-alone fax machines.

In several recent publications by Gartner, they have made it clear that an outsourced fax service option may not be appropriate for organizations if their fax traffic contains sensitive or confidential data such as medical records, financial information or personal details.

Healthcare organizations and other businesses who process sensitive customer data on fax machines can also benefit from the FDIC guidance. You can read the full FDIC guidance on mitigating risks posed by information stored on fax machines, photocopiers and printers at http://www.fdic.gov/news/news/financial/2010/fil10056.pdf.

As the makers of Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition, the world’s leading fax server that is used by hundreds of financial institutions around the world, we are proud of our customers’ accomplishments with our fax server technology. If you are interested in learning more about RightFax, please visit http://faxsolutions.opentext.com/ and http://www.futureoffax.com/.

If you have not guessed, I love faxing and secure document communication. You can contact me at mbrine[at]opentext.com and you can follow me on my Twitter business account at www.twitter.com/mattbrine.

Matthew Brine
Vice President
Fax and Document Distribution Group
Open Text Corporation

By Matthew Brine

Casey’s furniture, a family-owned business founded in 1921, is one of the longest-standing furniture retailers in Ireland. Their manual paper-based order fulfillment processes were causing costly delays, inefficiencies and errors. Many of the errors were expensive to fix and caused long delays for customers. Some employees were spending the equivalent of a full day per week on paper-based busywork to keep the business running.

Casey’s worked with Inpute Technologies, an Open Text Fax and Document solutions partner in Ireland, to digitize and streamline their order fulfillment process with an integrated, paper-free content solution utilizing Microsoft and Open Text technologies.

Casey’s orders are now routed for approval by Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Open Text Workflow Server, .NET edition and then electronically faxed to suppliers via Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition. Finally, they are stored in an accessible, easy-to-manage digital database with Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition. Employees also have the benefit of being able to send and receive faxes directly from their desktop and to utilize many of the other features of RightFax and Alchemy.

RightFax is the world’s leading fax server for sending and receiving mission critical documents such as purchase orders, invoices and legal agreements where secure transmission and proof of delivery is required. RightFax is used to reduce costs associated with standalone fax machines and paper-based processes.

RightFax has extensive integrations and product certifications with Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and other business applications and is the product of choice for unified communication vendors such as Cisco and MFP vendors like HP, Ricoh and Xerox. RightFax is a leader in production fax and FoIP (fax over IP) solutions and has over 100,000 servers installed worldwide.

Alchemy is a cost effective document imaging and archive solution for departments, work groups and small-to-medium businesses. Alchemy creates a digital file cabinet for your organization so you can securely store any document type and then find it within seconds, even years later. Thousands of customers use Alchemy today because it is easy to install, configure and use.

Among other results, Casey’s Furniture:

Eliminated fax machines and unessential printing for a reduction in printing and stationery costs of more than 60%.

• Reduced average time for order delivery to suppliers by up to eight days.
• Increased profit margins by meeting discount deadlines and reducing duplicate orders.
• Reduced order-related busywork close to 20 percent.
• Sped response time to customer inquiries by up to two weeks

Casey’s Furniture also improved customer service by increasing quality control and consistency of order-related processes, minimized redundant tasks across branches with central, integrated management and supported distribution efficiency with accurate, accessible information.

To read the full Casey’s Furniture customer success story, go to Casey’s Furniture Success Story.

Do you have a customer success story around RightFax or Alchemy? I would love to hear about it. You can contact me at mbrine[at]opentext.com and you can follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/mattbrine.

Matthew Brine
Vice President
Fax and Document Distribution Group
Open Text Corporation

http://faxsolutions.opentext.com/ and http://www.futureoffax.com/

Updated to point to new version of video: September 9 – Most of the videos on our YouTube channel are already targeting the Administrator. But they aren’t part of a series and they don’t have a cool name. I couldn’t think of a cool name, but now there is a series and I am calling it FaxAdmin. This series of videos will focus on the experienced administrator and integrator and introduce them to the more in-depth topics surrounding Fax Server.

The first video in the series is an introduction to the Integration Module. While I could spend a few hours on Production Faxing, I have just a few minutes to give you some of the basics. So I configure a basic setup and demonstrate its use. So yeah, kinda like all the other videos, but now its part of an official series, even if the series doesn’t have a cool name.

The Integration Module is an incredible component of the Fax Server which allows for automatic faxing of invoices and other application-generated documents as they are produced, with zero human intervention. Watch the video to find out more about the basic of the module:

In future FaxAdmin videos, I plan to cover some of the other concepts of the Integration Module, in addition to our integrations with Exchange, Lotus Notes, SMTP, Oracle, SAP, MFPs, and more. I hope you enjoy the video and I look forward to reading your comments below. Also, you can always reach me on twitter where I go by the name Technovangelist.

Although WebUtil was designed to be familiar and easy to use, it can still be a bit confusing. I guess thats because the other web-based communications apps have changed the common design, leaving WebUtil a little on its own. But its still just as easy to send and receive faxes on the web app. So I created a video around just sending a fax from WebUtil.

As you can see there is not much to it: click New, fill in some details, and click Send. I think the place that people get caught up is the addressing of the fax since you can’t just type in the details. Once you get used to it though, its quite useful. In fact, I think its a bit easier than the full Win32 FaxUtil to add several recipients to one fax.

For this video I went down a different track compared to most of the videos on our YouTube channel. I also took in some comments and I think they improved the results. So I have done away with Powerpoint slides completely. There aren’t any there. Its all video, my voice, and some music.

It starts off with the receipt of a fax. This is an actual fax coming in. The Fax Server was on a virtual machine on my laptop, connected over the network to a Open Text Fax Gateway 2100 with an FXS card. The virtual machine Fax Server is running the Dialogic SR140 and sends a fax to the 2100. That in turn sends the fax to a monster of a personal MFP, also on my desk. I covered up the Dell logo with a makeshift Open Text sticker and filmed the front, showing the fax coming in. Most of the page that you see is static, but the Cover Sheet Notes is an actual field. So I tweaked each take by sending a fax with the title of the sequence in the Cover Sheet notes. I did about 20 of these in one sitting so I won’t have to do that again. Well, not until you come up with some cool new video ideas.

The next segment is me, standing in front of the Open Text sign inside our Hoofddorp, NL office. Talking into a camera is a bit weird for me, so I made sure to do this on the weekend. The light is pretty good there with a bank of huge windows to my left. I still have some weird artifacts in the video, so I’ll have to work on cleaning that up.

Then comes the demo sequence. As with the previous Fax 101 videos, I am mixing up the desktop background with photos I have taken on trips in the last few years. Most of them were for training, so I felt they were relevant. This one is from a wedding that walked right past me while at one of the temples in Tokyo.

Finally we get some scrolling screenshots of the places you can go to for more information. The music at the beginning and end are short and long versions of a royalty-free jingle that comes with Logic on the Mac. There is some great stuff in there and when I finally learn how to be more creative, I am sure I will come up with something amazing. For now, you are stuck with a few Apple Loops I stitched together for the background music during the main demo. But I think it works and serves the purpose intended. The problem was that in the 5-10 second long gaps between narration clips in the demo, people thought the audio went away. The music is there to let you know there is an intentional gap in my voice.

I think my voice also sounds quite a bit better, a result of some better recording technique and I am just getting better at stitching it all together in Logic.

I would love to know what you think of the video. Not only the topic area covered, but also the production details. Was the music too loud at the beginning? Too distracting? Was the music in the middle too repetitive? What do you think of the pace of the video? Too slow? Would you rather see shorter videos on one topic, or longer videos covering multiple topics. These are all things you can share with me below in the comments, or on twitter where I go by the name Technovangelist.

I love it when viewers of the videos on our YouTube channel give me comments. One comment that I received late last week was that all of my videos are for the administrator or installer and videos for the new end user are needed. It was a great comment and I hadn’t really thought of doing videos for that audience. But that changes now.

I am producing a new series of videos targeting that new end user who just needs to know the basics of sending faxes and then doing something useful with them. If you have any new customers who need some end user training, forward them the links to the videos. And if you notice a topic area thats missing, let me know so I can add it to my list of upcoming videos.

Here is a table of contents of the videos. Not all of them are available today. Instead, as I create them, I will update the text below to links to the videos. So keep this page bookmarked. I plan to update it every week or two.

EDIT: September 7, 2010 – Added more videos to the list, plus completed one.
EDIT: March 3, 2011 – Completed another video.
EDIT: March 30, 2011 – Completed another video.

How to Send a Fax (Added on September 2, 2010)
How to Send a Fax From Outlook (Added on March 3, 2011)
How to Send a Fax From Lotus Notes
How to Send a Fax From WebUtil (Added on September 7, 2010)
How to Send a Fax From ANY Application (Added on September 2, 2010)
How to Send a Fax from Thunderbird (or any SMTP client) (Added on February 20, 2011)
How to Reply to a Fax
How to Record a Manual Fax
How to Approve Faxes
How to Route Faxes to Others (Added on March 30, 2011)
How to OCR a Fax
How to broadcast a fax
How to Print A Fax
How To Find A Fax
How To Use Billing Codes

If you are looking for help for the new Fax Server administrator, then sign up for our free monthly classes on Webex. We do them in both US and Europe timezones and we (I) cover all the basics a new admin needs to know. Just go to https://captaristraining.webex.com and click on the upcoming tab. Notice the time for each session and also pay attention to the page time zone on the upper right side.