OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

Did you know that we offer a Complimentary RightFax Administrator Course? A lot of you know about it because a large number of students have already attended this fantastic class which is offered at no additional cost. Many students have told us that the course gave them a well-rounded overview of the administration tasks related to RightFax. Attending the complimentary class also better prepares students about to attend the full three-day training.

There are many reasons though why some potential students may not attend a class. Often the classes are built around our schedules rather than yours. Since we hold them once every month, there is a good chance that other important projects will come up between now and then and a free course is sometimes pushed aside. We have been listening to our customers about these concerns and are delighted to now make the course available on your schedule.

The course is now available as a series of streaming videos. It has been split up into 7 sections, each covering a different aspect of the product. A total 22 feature-specific videos have been carefully designed to get you up to speed as quickly as possible. To help reinforce what you have learned, each section has a short quiz.

Here is how you can get started:

1. Visit http://faxdocs.tv/training and click the big blue button to register for an account
2. An email will be sent to you to help verify your account. Click the link to return to the site.
3. Now start watching the videos and answering the questions.

That’s it! And because the course is available as streaming video, you can come back to the site as often as you like to help refresh your memory. To get a better idea of what you will learn, check out this quick summary video.

If you have any feedback, let us know in the comments below. Your feedback is how we know what’s working and what needs improvement. I am really excited about this new offering and I look forward to hearing from you after you have had a chance to attend.

Have you ever had a question? Of course you have. How have you answered that question? You research. And when research doesn’t work? You ask. You have a conversation with someone which results in an answer.

When you have a question about our products, who do you have a conversation with? Sure, there is Tech Support for the questions that need an immediate response. But did you know you can also ask us more general questions? There are lots of ways to start a conversation with us.

I want to share one of those ways in this post. It’s called FaxDocs Live and you can find it at FaxDocs.tv/live on the third Thursday of every month. FaxDocs Live is a conversation between the Learning & Enablement group in FDDG, product management, and our partners and customers. When you visit the FaxDocs Live page on the 3rd Thursday of the month, you will see us talking about the topics you are most interested in.

And when I say that you will see us, I mean it. All of us leading the conversation will have webcams and you will actually see us. Here is a screenshot of a recent conversation.

FaxDocs Live February with Kieran Lane, Geoff Anderson, Joshua Butcher, and Matt Williams

Your face won’t be showing in the window, but we will definitely be listening to your questions. On the right side of the page is a chat window where you can ask questions to the entire group. We can all see the questions and we will answer them throughout the session.

As I said, FaxDocs Live happens on the 3rd Thursday of every month. This month it’s on March 15 at 5PM Central European Time (where I am in Amsterdam) which happens to be 9AM Pacific Time. To help figure out the right time where you are, visit this page. Those times will be fairly consistent through the year except when it gets closer to the Daylight/Standard time switchover, since that happens on different days around the world.

This month the topic is the RightFax Integration Module. Chad Derrington from Ingenium Software will get us started with an introduction to the topic. Then Joshua Butcher and Matt Williams (that’s me) from Learning & Enablement, Geoff Anderson from Product Management, and Dave Renner, a Solutions Consultant at OpenText, will start talking about our experiences as well as what our customers typically see.

But don’t let us speak for you, let us know what your questions are in the chat window. You can also tweet them by using the hash tag #fxdxlive. You can also have a say in what we should talk about in later FaxDocs Live sessions. At the bottom of the FaxDocs Live page is a form where you can tell us what you want us to talk about.

I am looking forward to meeting you on FaxDocs Live this month on March 15th.

Over the weekend I posted a new video to our FaxDocs.tv website. I intended it to be something only future students would be interested in, but in the last couple of days I have heard from a few others that it is a great idea. In fact, they asked for a few more on different topics in the same general format. Topics like Shared Services, Dialing rules and others are now in the pipeline for a future release.

If you use or implement RightFax and want a better idea of how the modules fit together, check out the video. This is the type of thing we cover in the RightFax course, so if you would like to learn more about info like this, join us in an upcoming class. You can find out more at the FaxSolutions Learning Services page.

If you have any ideas for future Notebook Diagram videos, be sure to share them with me either here in the blog comments, or via Twitter where I go by the name Technovangelist

As many of our customers know, Alchemy is an incredibly useful tool for departments and small- to medium-sized businesses to manage their documents. One of the most difficult challenges though, is getting the documents to the right place in Alchemy and indexing them with the most relevant metadata. One of the guys in our Dutch office realized this and worked with a developer on the Services team to come up with a solution to solve the issue. Jaap Jan’s idea, combined with Eric’s skills resulted in one of their most successful collaborations.

Fast forward a year or two and now that solution is being offered as a core product: The Alchemy Productivity Suite v9.0. Its still a little ways out but it’s exciting that we are allowed to talk about it publicly. One of the first ways you can learn about it is a video I created that covers the basics. I hope to release a few more Alchemy videos in the coming weeks and months.

There are a bunch of other changes slated for the Alchemy 9.0 release and as we get closer to that point, more of those details will start to trickle out and I’ll talk about it here. If you have any comments about Alchemy, comments about this video, or suggestions for future videos, share them with me here or contact me on Twitter where I go by the name Technovangelist.

Also, be sure to check out all of our videos on our new video channels site: http://faxdocs.tv

One of my goals each year for the last few years has been to create videos about our products. I really enjoy doing this, but it’s not always clear how our customers consume those videos. We can’t see if they like the video, or drop off after a few minutes. We can’t really control what our YouTube presence looks like or how to organize the videos beyond a certain level. And we have plenty of customers who just cannot see the videos at all, either because the corporate firewall blocks it or because they live in a country that forbids access to YouTube.

So we decided to come up with another solution that solves those problems. FaxDocs.tv is that new solution. It is a single site you can go to and watch all of the latest videos from our group. You can easily find all of the videos relating to each of our main product areas, as well as those targeting different audiences. We will create special pages as needed with pre-programmed playlists for topics like RightFax Fundamentals, etc.

At first (and for the foreseeable future) we will be cross-posting on YouTube and on FaxDocs.tv, but we expect most people will choose to view the videos on FaxDocs.

I hope you like the new FaxDocs.tv website. If you have any comments or suggestions on how to improve the site, share them with us here on the blog.

One of the websites I frequent is called Letters of Note. I don’t know how I first found this, but every day or so they publish another interesting letter or correspondence. I have seen letters to parents of Civil War soldiers, notes to movie studios, and more. No matter what the letter of the day is, most of them are well worth the few minutes it takes to read them. Today’s Letter of Note I thought was especially interesting considering that it was actually a fax.

Apparently in 1995, Stephen Hawking was asked by Face magazine for a time travel formula. Here is his response:

Are YOU on Google+? In case you haven’t seen it, Google has a new online property that’s taking the world by storm. Is it a Twitter killer? A Facebook Killer? I don’t know, perhaps its’s too early to tell, but it certainly has a lot to offer.

About a week ago, they opened Google+ to businesses, whereas before that it was just for real human beings with real names. Businesses can have pages just like on Facebook. The pages are a bit different than the Facebook variety, but all of it is so new, what I say here today may change tomorrow. All that I can say for certain is that if you are not there yet, you should be. And now that everyone can join without an invite, there is just no excuse to not join in.

The Fax & Document Distribution Group has a page on Google+ now. When you get onto plus.google.com, do a search for FDDG (the full name is OpenText FDDG Videos and Training). Or just click on this link to go right there. Then add us to one of your Circles.

Whenever we post anything to our Google+ page, you will see the message in your main Google Plus page. Go look around for your friends as well and add them to your circles. Then you will see news from everyone. On the left you can click on individual circles to filter down the news. I have circles for co-workers at OpenText, for people in FDDG, and for those in my department at the company. I also have circles for friends from when I was at Microsoft, and at other companies, and photographers I find interesting. How you create your circles is really up to you. Then when you decide to share something, you can share it with only certain circles.

One of the most exciting things for us on Google+ is the idea of a Hangout. This is like a multi-way video conference. You can have a bunch of people (for now its up to 10) join in on a hangout. We might have a hangout to just talk about RightFax or Alchemy. Or we might interview someone, maybe a partner or someone interesting inside OpenText we though you might like to meet. Who knows?

Its a new platform and the first few times we try it, it might not work. But if you would like to join us for the first experiment, add our page to one of your circles. I’ll post the link to the hangout there. At a minimum, I will be on there (this is Matt Williams posting), and Joshua Butcher is planning to be there as well. If you join you can ask us a question about anything you like. I am thinking its going to be on Tuesday at a time thats not too inconvenient for both the US and Europe. But you’ll have to watch for the announcement on Google+ for the precise details. If you aren’t one of the first 10 to join, don’t worry. I plan on streaming the hangout on Livestream.com as well, but the details for that will be on Google. You’ll also be able to post questions to Twitter.

I look forward to seeing you add us to your circles. I’ll then add you to our circles so that I can see what you are up to as well (if you choose to share any news with us). And look out for the posting on Monday or Tuesday morning at the latest. And then we will see each other on the Hangout.

See you then!

UPDATE November 9, 2011 – Now with a video!

As you may know, we have offered training for the RightFax Administrator course online for quite a while. For those of you in the United States, the class was offered at a sensible time, meaning during the day when you would normally be at work. Due to some technical issues we just can’t get around, that was the only course offered. For those potential students in Europe, the online option started somewhere between 4 and 6 pm. Since these are often 8 hour sessions, you are going to be on the phone till as late as 2 in the morning. Students in Hong Kong or Sydney would be online from close to midnight all the way to when their coworkers are just waking up.

In the last 6 years, I have done upwards of a half million miles of airtravel, so I know a thing or two about changing timezones, and that kind of stuff kills you. I have heard some people give figures of it taking upwards a day to adjust to each hour in a timezone shift. The more I travel, the more accurate I think that gets. So asking our customers to do this is a tough sell.

But now we are offering online courses in whatever timezone you are in. At first, it will be in my timezone. I live in Amsterdam, so the first course will be from 9AM my time (Thats CETor Central European Time) until about 4 or 5 in the afternoon. You lot in the US should not sign up for that course.

The first of these online courses in Europe is going to be held on November 22-24 and you can sign up at this link on the website. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you’ll see the RF Fundamentals course with a location of Virtual Classroom – Netherlands. These courses, like all of our courses, are open to customers and partners alike.

We will be adding some of the other courses to this system in the next few months as well, but if you need to take one today, start adjusting your sleep patterns for that US-based session.

If you would like to see a Fundamentals class in your timezone and you are in Mumbai, or Kathmandu, or Hong Kong, or Sydney, or anywhere else, contact us (best to contact your usual OpenText representative) and we can work on delivering that for you. If you want to do a more customized class, focusing only on Integrations, or end users, or anything else, contact me so I can work on getting that setup for you. I am reachable at mattheww atopentext.com or on twitter at technovangelist.

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.