A New Web Service in Town

May 4, 2011 7 Comments

As a member of the OpenText Professional Services team, I spend a lot of my time speaking with customers on the phone. In a recent conversation, the topic of web services for RightFax came up. Our customer was commenting that they could “really use a web services-based way to fax.”

Our answer? We agree. Due to the interest and inquiries about web services for RightFax, we’ve made the decision to go ahead and build RightFax Web Services.

Through OpenText Professional Services,web services for RightFax are now available. The RightFax Web Services are based on .NET and support both .NET clients as well as Java clients.

The basic design philosophy is simple. Let’s build a set of web services that .NET and Java (and other languages and frameworks) can use to send and retrieve faxes, metadata and attachments. We wanted it to be simpleand easy for you to use and consume.

Our new RightFax Web Services enable web-based capabilities to:

  • Send a fax
  • Retrieve a fax
  • Delete a fax
  • Route a fax
  • Forward a fax
  • Get a list of RightFax users

…just to name a few things.

The RightFax Web Services is not entirely new though. It was a key component of the Content Server Fax Connector (built by OpenText Professional Services) and grew out of ideas from our SharePoint Connector for RightFax so although it is a newly packaged offering it has been extensively tested and has been expanded, simplified and re-purposed for use by frameworks like .NET and J2EE.

As a customer, you might ask: Why should I use this? I can just use the COM API or a different RightFax API.

Well, that is true…but our web services are simpler and easier to use:

  • You no longer need to install FaxUtil and learn a complex API to support faxing.
  • You can use HTTP or an alternative protocol to connect to RightFax.
  • It provides a simple way to send a fax from a web client.
  • It supports your mandate to make your enterprise applications support SOA (service oriented architecture).
  • And it enables basic faxing while allowing you to avoid learning an API.

So your next question might be: “Where can I get these web services? And when can I start using them?”

For existing Developer Program customers, the answer is easy: you can download RightFax Web Services from the link below. It comes with extensive samples for .NET and Java, a detailed CHM, and more to name a few. Follow the instructions to get a 30 day license.

https://knowledge.opentext.com/knowledge/llisapi.dll/fetch/2001/15080935/-15106263/15106294/16592199/16592869/16594625/CustomView.html?func=ll&objId=16594625&objAction=browse&viewType=1

For any other questions about RightFax Web Services or to learn more about Professional Services, please contact captaris.sales@opentext.com.

Still have questions? You can view the fact sheet here:

https://knowledge.opentext.com/knowledge/llisapi.dll/fetch/2001/3551166/16512673/15703283/16881652/customview.html?func=ll&objId=16881652&objAction=browse&viewType=1

Stay tuned for my next blog: “I Need to Send a Fax, How Hard Can It Be?” where I’ll show you just how simple it is to send a fax with the RightFax Web Services.

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7 Responses to “A New Web Service in Town”

  1. Mukhesh May 5, 2011 at 8:03 am

    Quite interesting..
    Now, RightFax can easily be integrated in a SOA workflow.

  2. Jonathan Taylor May 5, 2011 at 1:54 pm

    It looks to be an exciting development but unfortunately the link to the instructions to obtain the 30 day license is protected. Is membership of the Developer Program required perhaps?

  3. Brian Langbecker May 6, 2011 at 7:06 am

    Yes, this is most certainly the case and a key focus and design goal for us. We wanted to have a service oriented architecture (SOA)/web services way to integrate many application types with RightFax. My next blog will show just how easy this can be to integrate and send a fax.

  4. Brian Langbecker May 6, 2011 at 8:11 am

    Jonathan, we will be coming out with a very detailed response shortly to answer your questions as well as additional ones we feel may be related.

  5. Brian Langbecker May 6, 2011 at 9:04 am

    30-day Evaluation licenses are available to both Developer Program and non-Developer Program customers. For non-Developer Program customers, please email captaris.ps@opentext.com to receive the ftp link to the files and inquire about purchasing and securing licenses.

    Production licenses are available to both Developer Program and non-Developer Program customers.

  6. Karl Tikoft May 24, 2011 at 4:36 pm

    First glance looks great,

    does it support 2 way SSL ?

  7. Brian Langbecker May 25, 2011 at 7:21 am

    The first release is a basic release, but fairly complete, and as such does not contain explicit support for this. This has been under consideration for being supported in a future release.

    I assume this is in regards to the general question of supporting encryption for data security?

    We have used the same web service with client and server certificates supporting complete end to end encryption. It required no code changes but only configuration changes and certificates so this is very doable with the web service.

    Feel free to contact us at captaris.ps@opentext.com for more details.