OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

Countless businesses use Microsoft Office 365 for everything from email and calendar services to document access and collaboration. They have already shown their smarts and thriftiness by reducing onsite hardware and software and working in the cloud. So why are some still relying on paper-based faxing and the expensive hardware, supplies and maintenance it requires? Maybe they don’t know about RightFax or Fax Appliance.

OpenText helps thousands of small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) around the world manage and deliver their business-critical documents. We have dozens of integration options with the most common back-office and other applications has made it extremely attractive to people who don’t want to buy (or learn) new software. One of the most popular recent integrations is with Office 365.

By integrating Fax Appliance or RightFax with Office 365, customers enjoy immediate upfront savings, increased security, and less time shuffling back and forth between workstations and shared standalone fax machines. In cases where sensitive and/or legally binding documents are required to be sent to third parties, fax machines in public areas produce highly visible paper documents and pose a serious risk to information security – potentially resulting in hefty regulatory fines. Our solutions allow you to manage user roles and permissions and fax from your desktop to erase this threat.

We have seen significant benefits for customers who use OpenText’s rich integration with O365. These include:

• More productive employees: No more time-consuming printing, manual faxing, and tracking.

• Lower telecom, paper, and equipment costs: Consolidate phone resources for faxing and stop paying for fax paper, cartridges, and machine maintenance, eliminate costs for filing, long-term archival and manual retrieval of paper faxes.

• Less fax preparation: Any that can be printed can be faxed.

• Improved efficiency: Send higher quality communication more quickly by faxing directly from  Office 365 via Print-to-Fax or email.

• PDF routing: Route incoming faxes to  Office 365 as PDF attachments.

• MFP integration: Fax through our fax solutions without purchasing phone lines and costly fax kits for multiple MFPs.

• Improved audit, compliance, and legal readiness: Audit trails are legally recognized making it easy to provide proof of compliance.

• Document centralization: Keep all your communications in one place by using the  Office 365 email client to send and receive faxes.

• Support of green initiatives: Save trees (and money) by getting rid of a lot of paper.

That’s just what I can think of off the top of my head – basically, if you’re a SMB that uses Office 365 and also needs to fax, OpenText can help. If savings and security alone aren’t enough to pique your interest learn more about the benefits and integration listing from Fax Appliance and RightFax.

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.

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.

UPDATE: I posted a video about this topic here: http://faxsolutionsblog.opentext.com/2011/09/02/faxing-from-outlook-web-access-video-edition/

This afternoon a colleague asked if I had a working virtual machine with RightFax and the Exchange integration already installed. I did. It’s a new VM I am uploading to our new training-in-the-cloud vendor (more on that soon). He wanted some screenshots showing the process of sending a fax from Outlook Web Access. So I booted up the machines and logged in to OWA for the first time on that VM.

He told me to create an email and send a fax. And I had to pause for a few seconds. Even though I made those videos about addressing a fax, I forgot the proper addressing scheme to use to send an email as a fax. He could tell I was confused so walked me through the process: Open contacts, then add a new contact, and enter the fax number. Save. Now send an email to that contact with the fax number.

He obviously saw that I went from confused to very confused and highly doubtful. Well, thats not going to work (I continued the sentence in my head with the phrase “fool“). He offered to put a wager on whether this would work and while I was confident it would not, I had a feeling he knew something I did not.

I clicked send and flipped over to FaxUtil, getting ready to say, “I told you so”. The fact that I am writing this should probably clue you in to the fact that my expected outcome didn’t come true. The fax worked. It really worked. He told me I had to write a blog about it and let everyone know what a genius he is. I don’t know if I will go that far, but Jaap Jan Pepping does surprise me from time to time.

So why does this work? Well when you send a message and choose to use the fax number, OWA inserts a FAX: at the beginning of the fax number. Our Exchange Connector watches out for addresses that start with RFAX or FAX and forwards them to the RightFax Server. It makes total sense, but I was still amazed that it was so simple to send a fax, even from OWA.

Did you know this? Am I the only one who missed it? Well, I am still excited that this was so easy.

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.

It was going to be a fairly normal evening. I was reading about the Pareto Distribution and the Long Tail when I decided to check my RSS feeds for anything new and interesting. And guess what….I saw something new and very interesting. There was an article on the GoogleEnterprise blog about Google Apps Script. I had heard about this from a friend this weekend, but had put off looking into it. The article got me very interested and I decided to check it out right away.

I first looked at the page for the language and then started watching the video on that page. Very cool! Simple, yes, but very cool. So I wanted to try it out. I went to my Google Docs page and created a new spreadsheet called Outgoing GFaxes.

I added 4 column headers: Fax Number, Recipient Name, From Name, and Notes. OK, so nothing really interesting so far, right. Just like any spreadsheet.

Then I created a form from the Form menu. Google Docs automatically recognizes the headings of my spreadsheet to created a form for me. All I had to do was change the Notes field to be a paragraph of text and make the Fax Number required.

So now I have a form that people can fill out so that makes things a bit interesting, but I’m not sending faxes yet. And I haven’t touched Google Apps Script. Don’t worry, it’s coming. I can decide the publish this form for people to fill out, say on my Google App Engine site, or my Google Sites site, or even on my non-google website since it can be published in an iframe. Optionally I can also lock down the spreadsheet so people cannot see the inner workings, but can fill out the form.

Now save and close the form and go to the Script Editor under Tools -> Scripts. Enter this script:

function onFormSubmit(e) {
 var timestamp = e.values[0];
 var faxnumber = e.values[1];
 var recipname = e.values[2];
 var notetext = e.values[4];

 MailApp.sendEmail("/fax=" + faxnumber + "/name="+recipname
                       +"/@fax.otex.train", notetext,"");
}

This script is basically collecting all the fields you entered, then sending an email to the SMTP fax domain you set up with SMTP integration in RightFax. From watching my videos and reading my blogs, you know that the /fax=faxnumber/name=recipient/@yourfaxdomain.com is the addressing scheme for a fax when using SMTP integration. Save the script. I saved it as SendFaxEmail. But this script isn’t going to work…not yet. You need to do one more thing.

The script as it is won’t send emails and wont respond to submitted forms until you add an installed event handler. To do that, go to Triggers -> Current Script’s Triggers and create a trigger. You want a trigger that looks like this:

You’ll have to accept a dialog that says you trust the script, but then thats it. When someone goes to the live form, they’ll be able to type in the information, click submit, and the fax will be sent.

I’ll be adding a bit more functionality to this in the next blog post. Be sure to come back to find see the next step. But it’s not going to be tomorrow. I am teaching a Rightfax class this week, so my schedule is going to be a bit tight and I’ll need a couple days to prep the next blog.

I hope you found this post interesting. If you have any questions or thoughts, leave them in the comments section below. You can also contact me through Twitter where I go by the name technovangelist.

When I posted that Intro to the Fax Appliance video last week, Jaap-Jaan Pepping asked a question about the Print To Fax Driver. Basically the question was ‘why didn’t I show it’? Well, I have no good reason….I just forgot. But it’s not that I forgot to include it, I forgot to even try it. I just tried it for the first time about 10 minutes ago and guess what….it is just as easy to use as the rest of this appliance.

The first step is to go to the Preferences section of the client. On that dialog there is a button to download the print to fax client. When you open the file you downloaded, it will open one dialog asking you for information about how to connect to the system.

I entered my name and password. A few seconds later, the install was complete and the little icon in the status try told me it connected.

So now I was ready to go. I opened up Microsoft Word and wrote up a little test document to send. From the standard print dialog, I chose the Fax Printer. If you have Rightfax installed as well, you want the Fax Printer, not the RightFax Fax Printer. But the company who is buying the Fax Appliance probably hasn’t also bought RightFax…I think. Anyway, when you choose that printer and click Print, you get this dialog. (It came up surprisingly quick!)

This is pretty much the same dialog you see inside the actual Fax Appliance client. I can add my recipient’s name and fax number. I can even choose to add this recipient to my Contacts, which is pretty cool.

If I want to, I can add other contacts which are already in my Contacts collection.

The next step is to choose any other documents I want to add, beyond the one that I just printed.

I can choose a coversheet and fill in the coversheet notes. By the way, the coversheet you see is not one of the standard coversheets, but a custom coversheet I created in just a few minutes. Maybe a future video or blog will cover coversheet creation with the Fax Appliance…let me know in the comments if you want one of those.

I can fill in some other information here and then click send. You might have noticed that all the other dialogs had the send button as well, so I could have skipped the last few dialogs and just sent the fax quickly.

When I am done, the Print-to-Fax icon shows me that the fax was submitted successfully to the system for sending.

And thats it. It took longer to write up the blog post than it did to figure out how to Print to Fax with the Fax Appliance. It probably took you longer to read this than to just do it. It really is easy!!!

I hope this post is useful for you and if you have any comments, leave them in the comment section below. If you have been reading this blog recently, you’ll see that almost every comment gets turned into a detailed answer via either a blog entry or a longer video, so I hope you’ll see that we seriously take notice of the comments here. If you don’t want to comment here, you can also share your thoughts with me on Twitter, where I can be reached at technovangelist.

Today I added a brand new video to our video channel on FaxDocs.tv. This one is another in my Fax101 series, focusing on sending faxes from Microsoft Outlook with the OpenText RightFax Fax Server.

As you can see, its incredibly easy to send faxes from Microsoft Outlook. In fact, its even easier to send from Outlook than it was to send from SMTP since you have access to all of the Advanced Faxing Options on the Office Ribbon.

When you click the Fax button, you’ll get a condensed version of the New Fax Dialog. Enter the name of the person you are sending a fax to along with their fax number. This will begin to fill in the details of your fax cover sheet. Click done to close the dialog. When you return to the Microsoft Outlook message, you’ll see that the To: line has been filled in with a specially formatted string. Now you can enter your subject. The average fax cover sheet typically won’t have a subject, so we take that information to fill in the cover sheet notes for the fax. If you enter anything into the body of your email message, that text will become the first page of the fax.

So what about attachments? Attachments in your Microsoft Outlook message become each of the pages after the first page and/or the fax cover sheet.

One of the features you get in the Microsoft Outlook integration that you don’t get with SMTP is access to the Advanced Faxing Option. On this dialog you can set billing codes, other fields for the fax cover sheet, attach Library Documents defined on the RightFax Fax Server, and much more.

When you click on send, the message is sent. This message actually starts its life as an email and Microsoft Outlook hands it off to the back-end server called Microsoft Exchange. Exchange looks at the address that you entered at the top and sees that it includes the word: rfax. That’s a magic setting which tells Exchange to export the email to a special folder that the RightFax Fax Server monitors. Within a minute or so, the RightFax Fax Server picks up the message, processes it, and sends it out as a single, multiple-page fax, complete with fax cover sheet and attachments.

The integrations with products like Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, and SMTP are part of what makes the RightFax Fax Server so powerful.

So what’s the picture this time around? Well its the copper pots and pans hanging in my sister’s kitchen.

I hope you enjoy this video. If you have ideas for future videos, leave a comment here. If you use Twitter, then contact me there where I go by the name technovangelist .

UPDATE: February 3, 2012 – This post now points to our video channel at FaxDocs.tv instead of our channel on YouTube. The YouTube channel still exists, but FaxDocs.tv is the better place to go. While you are at it, check out all the other videos at FaxDocs.tv. You can find videos by topic, such as all RightFax or Alchemy videos or by audience such as Fax101 for new fax users. If there are any videos you think we still need, let us know.

Last Friday, I released a new video introducing you to the basic setup and use of the Fax Appliance A102 and A104. In the comments to the blog entry that accompanied the video, Jaap-Jaan Pepping asked about the notifications that come from the device. I can’t believe I forgot to include those. That was a line item in my script and notes, but somehow in the edit process, I forgot to include it.

Shown above is a screen shot from Thunderbird on a Mac. For some reason, Thunderbird removed the logo from the top left corner, but it shows that the notification is actually quite nice looking. This is the notification that is received when you get a new fax in your mailbox on the Fax Appliance. Click the link and you are taken directly to the fax in the Fax Appliance web interface. Alternatively, you can open the fax locally since it has been included as an attachment to the email.

I think this is a pretty nice feature of the product and I hope you do too. If you have any other questions about the Fax Appliance, leave them here in the comments below. Or contact me on Twitter, when I go by the name Technovangelist.

Last week I posted a video about sending a fax using an SMTP email client. A few hours later someone asked to see me send a fax from Pine (since I mentioned it was possible). Minutes later, a colleague asked if the simpler SMTP faxing still works. It certainly does!!! I don’t know why I didn’t mention it in the videos. If you have trouble remembering when to use slashes and what values to enter between them, simple addressing may be the solution.

So what is Simple Addressing for SMTP faxing? Well, its the simplest possible way to address an email to go out as a fax. Think about it, what is the single most important piece of information required to send a fax??? Well, it’s the fax number of course. So Simple Addressing uses only that single piece of info:

1234567@fax.com

That address will be forwarded to RightFax which will then send a fax to fax number 1234567. The down side of course to Simple Addressing is that there is no recipient name. But maybe the fact that this is soooo easy to remember makes that an acceptable loss.

Despite that being incredibly easy to remember, I tried to think of a way to make it even easier. It would be great if I could do 1234567@fax, but an address like that means modification of you SMTP client. Most will see that as an invalid address. The part after the @ sign must have a word made of 1 or more letters, followed by a dot (.), followed by another word of 1 or more letters. So 1234567@f.ax or 1234567@f.x would both work. But is it easy to remember an f.x domain name? I don’t know. What do you think?

If you have any comments about this blog post or suggestions for future blog posts, leave them in the comments section below. Or contact me on Twitter where I go by the name Technovangelist.

Some other videos you might enjoy:

Introduction to the Fax Appliance A102 and A104

Faxing Just Got Easy (The original music-based intro to the appliance)

How To Send A Fax From FaxUtil

How To Send A Fax From Any Application

How To Send a Fax From WebUtil