OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

If you’ve ever wondered how to:

• Manage individual delegates via one tool
• Import and export delegate settings
• Run reporting on delegates

I’ve got good news for you.  Delegates Manager is a fax solution offering that allows administrators to handle all three of these tasks.  Today’s blog will focus on just how to make the most of this solution.

Managing individual delegates…

One of the first ways you can use the Delegates Manager is to manage individual delegates.  After logging into the tool as administrator you select a tab called “Management”.

Next, you select a user you want to manage.  At this point you will be able to see which RightFax users have access to the user you selected. 

This is also where you can add a new delegate as well as choose what permissions they have by selecting the check boxes and click the appropriate button to apply the settings.  And of course, if necessary, you can also delete a delegate from here.

Import and export delegates…

If you select the “Import/Export” tab and you can:

• Export delegates from a server
• Import delegates from a server
• Export delegates from a server and periodically restore settings to overwrite user updates

Exporting is pretty easy and can be completed by selecting a combination of groups and users and then clicking “Start Export”.  Sensitive information?  No problem; you can encrypt the file for security purposes.  And the file being exported is in XML format which allows third-party applications to create XML export files.

Once you are done exporting you can logout of the current RightFax server, log in to a new RightFax server and import the delegates settings.   This keeps the delegates settings the same between RightFax servers and allows it to function as a master server with properly setup delegates permissions.

Word of caution: the Delegates Manager will only import the settings of users that it can find on the destination server based on their user name.  It will then update existing delegates permissions to match the exported settings so that they are identical.  Information on conflicts with missing users between the export and import systems are displayed on the screen and extensive logging is placed in the event log.

Reporting on delegates…

Lastly, we have a module that allows for reporting on delegates.  These reports can then be exported in a variety of formats.  This is also the only feature discussed today that can be run as a non-administrator.  As an administrator, however,  you can report on delegates for the entire RightFax server whereas a non-administrator can only report on the delegates for the RightFax group they are a member of.

Much like the “Import/Export” tab, you select the users and groups you want to report on.

When you select “Generate Report” it will display a generated report on the screen that you can then print or export in to your chosen format; including PDF, excel, and XPS.

To recap, Delegates Manager can:

• Manage individual delegates
• Import and export delegate settings
• Run reporting on delegates

What’s next?  Part two will dive into specific use cases for the Delegates Manager.

The fact sheet for the Delegates Manager can be found below:

 https://knowledge.opentext.com/knowledge/llisapi.dll/Open/19032063

Please note, the Delegates Manager is a licensed solution and evaluation copies are available.

To request a copy of the Delegates Manager, an evaluation license or to learn more about Professional Services, please contact captaris.sales@opentext.com.

As a fax-nerd, I am pretty excited about our September 22nd webinar: Take the Mystery out of SIP Trunking. From a fax perspective and at its most basic definition, SIP trunking simply means to send a fax from one IP device to another without having to go through the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

This is where the Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSP) comes to the rescue. Ultimately, there are two important “take-aways” from this upcoming session that I think are worth noting:

First, make sure you are using a Session Border Controller.

You have two methods of working with SIP Trunking: a) piggy-back on your existing internet connection and risking the performance and security issues that come with that or b) get a Session Border Controller (SBC) which will be used to manage the connection between your site and the ITSP. The choice of using a SBC should seem obvious if you are in the enterprise fax world.

Second, know your FoIP protocol choices.

In the world of Fax over IP (FoIP), there are really only two options to consider: T.38 Fax Relay (where the IP gateway agrees to “relay” the fax tones sent to/from the fax server) or Fax Pass-through (where the IP Gateway simply “passes” the fax tone samples sent to/from the fax server).  This makes T.38 Fax Relay the better choice as you do not have to encapsulate every little fax squeak and noise and then over the network between the OpenText RightFax server and the ITSP.  It is the fax tone samples that are the most sensitive to network problems and if lost or out of sync, you are most likely going to get some fax transmission errors. This means if you are using Fax Pass-through instead of T.38 Fax Relay, you may have some issues with SIP Trunking (in particular if you do not use a SBC).

If you are interested in learning more, I encourage you to register for Take the Mystery Out of SIP Trunking on September 22 at 10AM PDT. 

If you have any experiences with SIP trunk faxing, I would love to hear them. You can tweet me @JoshuaTeaches or via email at jbutcher@opentext.com

Image provided by amanderson2

Recently I visited with Ricoh Netherlands to get a better idea of how they integrate with the RightFax MFP Module. It was a fascinating. After the end-user walks up to the device and provides their credentials, they can tweak almost every setting they would have access to in the full FaxUtil client. They can enter cover sheet notes, complete destination information, and much much more.

It really is impressive and I encourage you to look in to their solutions. But first watch my video on the topic:

One of the first topics we talk about in the RightFax Admin class is planning for a RightFax installation. During that section, one of the factors we discuss is the amount of space required to manage all the faxes on the system. Well, there are a few places where we can take up diskspace. First there is the actual installation of RightFax. This is pretty small, about 500-750 MB, and some of that is for features that you might not even be using yet. Then there is the database. We store all the metadata about the faxes as well as all the configuration data in a Microsoft SQL Server. Despite storing so much of the really important information that RightFax relies on, the size of the database never gets really big. The largest disk space hog in the system are the actual fax images.

We store every page of every fax separately. They are all in the Images directory where ever you installed RightFax to. Each file has a filename that starts with a special ID defined by the system. The 3 letter extension says what page the file represents. Page 1 is .301, page 2 is .302, etc. Why did we start at 301? Well, um….if you have any idea, share it with me because I have absolutely no clue.

The size of each of those files depends on a variety of factors, such as the amount of text on the page, and the level of compression that was achieved by the system. If you send out a bunch of test faxes with just the standard coversheet and no text, each page will probably be around 15 KB. Send a full page graphic of Mickey Mouse and you are looking at something closer to 70KB. On average though, we see something around 35KB per page. So thats what you should assume going in.

To figure out how much space you need, think about how many faxes you send and receive in a given day. We store all incoming faxes AND outgoing faxes, so count both directions in your calculations. Thens its just 35KB x number of fax pages you send and receive in an average day x number of days you want to keep those faxes for. For most installations, this number is no longer something to stress too much over.

How big is your RightFax installation? I would love to hear about some of the largest setups here on the blog.

For over 25 years, Price Brothers (UK) Ltd has been part of the Great Man-Made River water supply project in Libya, a project set up to bring fresh water from deep under the Sahara Desert to coastal towns and cities. They were responsible for the original design of this 1600km underground network of pipes and aqueducts, which is recognised as being the largest of its type in the world.

During this time, Price Bothers amassed a huge library of documents. Current project documentation alone is estimated to be three quarters of a million paper documents – a mixture of drawings, plans and critical correspondence.

Using OpenText Alchemy, a document management solution, ProcessFlows partner Castle Document Management provided an electronic filing cabinet for Price Brothers which exactly replicates and retains their manual filing system.

Searching for information and drawings is now a quick and easy desktop function. Documents can be retrieved and viewed from the CDs at the click of a button and office space taken up by large filing cabinets has been reclaimed, as there is no longer a need to retain the paper documents.

Having dealt with current project documentation, Castle Document Management is continuing to work with Price Brothers to electronically archive older information. Once the process has been completed and everything is in electronic format, backed-up and secure, the paper will be securely destroyed, in line with compliance regulations. There is also the option for Castle Document Management to host the Alchemy repository. Users would then be able to access their documents from any web enabled device. Either way, there is no need for a dedicated document storage server.

Read the entire Price Brothers case study here for more information.

Have you ever tried to use the keystroke, Control-F10 in FaxUtil. If you have, you might have wondered why such a useless keyboard shortcut was added to the product. I wondered that myself for the first 5 years I worked here. But then I stumbled on to a variant of the normal command. It all happened about a year ago.

I was teaching a three day RightFax Admin class and mentioned the keystroke, kind of as a side note. But I was shocked when it looked different than what I was used to. I think I was on a different service pack than usual, so I attributed it to that at first. But then one of my students said his looked the way I was used to and we were both on the same version. That student’s name was Fritz and he noticed that he sorted his list of faxes based on Date and I sorted them based on phone number. It was amazing.

I tried changing the sort order and with each Ctrl F10, I got a different view. Very cool. That night I decided to make a video documenting what I found. I set up a tripod in my kitchen and recorded my monologue. And then I sat on it….for 9 months. I’m not sure what happened, but I stumbled on the video last weekend. A little clean up and it was ready to publish. And here, at long last, is my Ctrl F10 video.

Let me know what you think. Did you know CTRL F10 did this? Was I the only one in the dark? Share it with me in the comments.

Its the beginning (give or take a few days) of the month and that means its time for me to check the stats for our videos. Each month I go check out the YouTube Insight reports for each of the videos I have published over the last few years. I enjoy doing this because it shows me what people are interested in right now. As the name of the reporting engine implies, it gives me insight into what I should be looking at for future videos. Some of the results are as I expect, but there are always surprises as well.

Despite it being one of my favorite topics, I can understand why the video on Creating Custom Administration Tools is not at the top of the most watched list. It never has been anywhere close to most popular, but I think its fantastic. That video covers using the Microsoft Management Console to create a remote building tool for Alchemy. But you could just as easily use the concepts to build a tool for RightFax or any other application you need to manage. I plan on updating this with a Server 2008 management tools version in the next few months.

My most popular video for the last few months has been one about sending faxes from Outlook. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Outlook is one of the most popular ways our customers interact with the RightFax Server. The fact that it gets 200 times the hits of the MMC video is understandable.

Another interesting stat is that the second most popular video for August 2011 was one that was posting in October of 2009. Its the one about Installing and Configuring Fax over IP. That has been one of the most consistently popular videos since it was posted, though it didn’t start out that way.

Not only do I look at stats per video per month, I also look at how the videos do in their first 30, 60, and 90 days. The Install & Configure FoIP video didn’t do very good on its first 90 days, but the Faxing Just Got Easy video performed the best for that time span. Again, thats understandable, because it was embedded on a few different properties.

Do you have any favorite videos over the last couple years? Anything you wish I would cover? Let me know in the comments below.

Last week I asked you how you could find a fax image that belonged to a fax. On Friday, I gave part one of the answer, and today I’ll give you part two of the answer. The first way was to press ALT-F10. When you are in FaxUtil and press ALT F10, you will get lots of information about that fax, like when it came in, what channel it came in on, and how it was processed by the server.

Now for the second way to get this information: FAXDUMP. Are you familiar with that? FAXDUMP is one of the Administrator Utilities. You can find it at c:\program files\RightFax\AdminUtils\Faxdump.exe (assuming of course you have installed RightFax to c:\program files\RightFax). If you don’t have an AdminUtils directory, go to the RightFax Installation Wizard under the Windows Control Panel where you add and remove programs, choose to modify your installation, and add the Administrator Utilities. If you are on RightFax 9.3 or earlier, then download the AdminUtils from the OpenText Knowledge Center.

FaxDump is designed to give you detailed information about all the faxes on your system. And since it’s a command line driven app, you can very easily integrate it into all of your other applications that may need access to this info. Here is a simple command you can run:

FAXDUMP -ftrnsrv -l2 -omyfaxes.txt -h

This will dump out a CSV file to myfaxes.txt listing out information like Owner ID, To Fax Num, Fax Date and Time, Channel Used, Number of Pages, and the filenames for the cover sheet and the body. Here are all the command line options for FaxDump that I think are important:

-f{fax server name} 

	Server name for your fax server. In my case above, trnsrv is 

	the name of my fax server

-a{userID}

	User ID you want to use to access the server. It should be a 

	user with administrator privileges. If you are using 

	NT Authentication, skip this.

-p{password}

	userID's password. Again, if using NT Authentication, skip this

-smm/dd/yyyy

	The starting date for faxes you want to dump out. Note the 

	4 digit year.

-s-{dayOffset}

	Instead of a starting date, you can also enter a date offset. 

	So -s-7 means 7 days ago.

-emm/dd/yyyy

	The ending date for faxes you want to dump out. Note the 4 

	digit year.

-e-{dayOffset}

	Instead of a ending date, you can also enter a date offset. 

	So -e-7 means 7 days ago.

-u{userList} 

	Comma separated list of users you want to generate the dump for. 

	Leave this out for all users. -uadministrator,matt,joe means 

	dump all the faxes for those three users.

-g{groupID}

	Just dump for faxes for a given userid, like -geveryone

-o{outputFileName}

	Output the CSV data to a file name instead of the screen.

-l{infoLevel}

	This defines what kind of information you want to dump. I 

	find level 2 to be the most useful, but you can run FaxDump -q 

	to get a list of all the levels

-h

	Output a header on the first line, listing out all the field 

	types. Very useful!

There are a few other options, like -t, -i, -d, and -1, but I don’t find them to be very useful. Once you have a text file, you can open it up in Microsoft Excel or just archive it away. In fact, one great use for this is to run the command before an archive. Now you have a kind of table of contents of your fax server going back in time. I think that could be pretty useful.

Do you use FaxDump? Do you use another tool I have forgotten about? Tell me about it here in the comments. I would love to hear from you.

Last week I posted a blog about sending faxes from Outlook Web Access. I received a few questions about it so I figured it was worthy of a video to help explain everything. I really was amazed when I saw this work so well. I would love to hear what you think of this too.