OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

At the 2011 Open Text Global Fax Summit, I sat in on the Introduction to Hosted Fax Services and Leveraging Fax Technology thought Google, Microsoft, SAP, and FileNET session. The session, as you can see by the name, covered several topics but the focus was really on two new offerings now available with RightFax.

The Hosted services is a cloud based fax offering that allows customer to have a fax environment without having to dedicate the resources and rack space to manage it. Why is the Open Text hosted services model better than other solutions? Well, this is not your store-and-forward-mass-fax offerings where faxes from all clients sit on a common server to be sent out. With the Open Text model each customer has their own dedicated RightFax server environment that can operate as an on-premise RightFax server.  This means you can connect MFPs, Exchange, Various Integrations, and RightFax Clients and allows the Hosted customers a feature-rich private fax environment that is robust, secure, and has virtually no system maintenance. It is also offered in two flavors. You can move your current RightFax environment to the hosted solution or, if you are a new customer, you can “rent” the software in the hosted environment. The Hosted offering also has three service levels from Standard, Enterprise, to Premium with increasing SLAs for each. This offers another great benefit in having a solution that has a very high SLA for those customers where fax is considered mission critical.

The second offering the session covered was a new feature available in RightFax 10 that allows users of Microsoft Office365 and Google Apps to integrate with fax. For those of you that don’t know what Office365 and Google Apps are, they are cloud based office suites that include mail and applications for creating documents, spreadsheets, etc. So how does that work? RightFax 10 now offers a secure connection using SMTP/POP3 with SSL that allows both suites to connect to the RightFax server just as if everything was on-premise.

Why is this important? Because Microsoft is committing quite a bit of resources to grow the Office365 subscription service and Google now has 30 million clients or 3 million businesses subscribed,  there are quite a number of people that can now take advantage of this new feature. Also since they are RightFax then can maintain their company faxes for compliancy where needed.

I found the session very informative about both solutions as the speakers went into great detail on each subject. The hosted offering offers a new way for customers to manage, increase their SLA, or get started with a fax server environment. With Open Text’s eleven years of hosting enterprise applications you can defiantly sleep well at night knowing that the experts will be managing your fax environment.  Also, the many users of Office365 and Google Apps now have the industry leading  enterprise fax server at their finger tips with the new integration abilities of RightFax 10.

Hopefully you may be able to use one of these technologies in your business to help expand, manage, or start a new fax server environment. If any of you have had experience with these new offerings please post and let everyone know how it worked for you.