OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

The new Fax Appliance Feature Pack 2 for Fax Appliance A102 and A104 is now available.  The OpenText Fax Appliance family of plug and play products is designed to simplify overall deployment and use while providing a cost effective alternative to MFP fax kits as well as traditional fax boards and remote fax servers.   We’ve made quite a few changes based on the key capabilities requested by our customers to further enhance our Fax Appliance.

Here is a snapshot of just a few of the new features:

• Receive faxes in PDF file format
• Cloud-based email support (e.g. Google Apps)
• Import contacts to shared phonebook
• Import phonebook entries from FaxPress
• And many more exciting features 

For the complete Fax Appliance feature list, please visit: http://fax-appliance.com/features/

You can also attend the Nov. 1 webinar to learn more.  Register here.

For additional information, please visit www.fax-appliance.com.

Question #2: What is the best protocol to use for FoIP?

T.38 is the ITU recommendation for Group 3 (G3) fax transmission between terminals where, in addition to the PSTN, a portion of the transmission path used between G3 facsimile terminals includes an IP network. T.38 has become the accepted standard for FoIP communications, in part because of its multi-level redundancy mechanism to maintain fax integrity as well as its low bandwidth requirements.

Question #3: Who is the leader in T.38 innovations?

The global leader in T.38 technology is Dialogic. What differentiates Dialogic from every other T.38 vendor is their documented interoperability list and the testing that they do to ensure that their technology works across the many different fax machines and gateways in the market today. Dialogic’s FoIP solutions also offer G.711 pass-through as an option to ensure that compatibility with legacy media gateways is still possible.

Important: When choosing a FoIP solution, always ask to see the public interoperability lists and compatibility information supported by the vendor.

Stay tuned for part 3, Wednesday, November 2.

Earlier this year, Matthew Brine wrote an article for Telecom Reseller  that spoke to how fax continues to be an integral part of business today.  The essence of the article was to debunk the myth that fax is obsolescent technology and explain how fax has evolved to assist many companies to reduce their costs, streamline (automate) business processes and improve employee productivity.

A key component driving the evolution of fax technology is fax over IP (FoIP) or IP faxing as it is sometimes called.  Although the concept of FoIP is not new, it can be difficult to find a simple and consistent explanation of FoIP, thus causing confusion and questions.   Some of this confusion is caused by suppliers of FoIP technology in an effort to promote their own products. Consequently, I thought it would be good to provide some information about FoIP and share some resources to help you make the best decision for your company and your fax needs.

Here are 9 ½ questions and answers that will help you gain insight into FoIP:

Question #1: What exactly is FoIP?

FoIP is simply a means of sending and receiving faxes over an IP network. There are basically three different kinds of FoIP protocols that can be used: G.711 pass-through, T.37 store-and-forward and T.38 fax relay.

• G.711 pass-through works just like a voice over IP (VoIP) call where every component of the fax communication is sent in the form of voice packets. If you lose some of those voice packets, the fax can easily be distorted resulting in failed transmissions. Since the traffic is all voice packets, bandwidth demands can be pretty high.

• T.37 store-and-forward works more like an e-mail where the fax content is sent to a mail server to be processed. Unlike the other FoIP protocols this is not real-time, meaning that there is no way for the sender to know whether the fax is actually being received at the same time you are sending it.

• T.38 fax relay only sends just enough voice packets (i.e., tones) for a media gateway to determine whether the call is a fax or not. The rest of the fax tones are then “relayed” from the gateway and not the fax server itself.

Stay tuned for the next post on Monday, October 31st.