OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

Give fax a break already.

It’s a sad day for one of the world’s most unfairly maligned pieces of hardware. Fax machines just made No. 14 in a list of 15 Current Technologies a Child Born Today Will Never Use. The blogger, Laptop Magazine’s Online Editorial Director Avram Piltch, slotted the hapless device all the way down at No. 14, and for an already misunderstood “gadget that had its heyday in the 1970s” that’s got to hurt.

Now, to be fair, Piltch was only talking about fax machines, and he is almost certainly correct that those appliances will eventually go the way of the dodo. What he failed to mention–and what is too often overlooked–is that fax technology itself (which has already proven its value and resilience for more than a century) can look forward to many more years of usefulness and ubiquity before being forced into early retirement by younger, more attractive methods of communication……or a super-intelligent army of robots.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem is not the technology: people are faxing higher volumes faster than ever before, in many cases between IP addresses straight from their email client, or even automatically as preconfigured batches while they sleep. It’s the word: FAX. People can’t help but associate fax with the fax machine and a bygone era of cigarettes and leisure suits.

Facsimile or fax simply means a copy sent using voice technology. With the growing popularity and availability of Fax over IP (FoIP) , there are now dozens of ways to do this securely, even without much of a reliance on analog phone lines or fax machines. Fax servers, protocols and delivery methods are still constantly evolving and have not yet lost pace with competing communication options.

Finally, Mr. Piltch, I will not “let go of the signature requirement.” That “lame excuse for the continued use of the fax machine” is still a very compelling one for newer fax technologies. Keep in mind that fax is a simple, point-to-point transmission involving only two people (the sender and the receiver). A fax can be verifiably tracked throughout its journey between friends and is still much more secure than email or an online signature where receipt confirmation is absent. Fax is still the only transmission that won’t fall down in any court, and thousands of people even use fax to vote in federal elections. Because the basic technology of fax is so simple, it is everywhere: essentially, anyone anywhere in the world who has a phone jack has the capability to fax. This makes it ideal for doing business across industries and borders.

Every day the delusion is spreading that fax is no longer relevant, but with hundreds of millions of faxes being sent and received every single day, I just don’t buy it.

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 use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets is becoming increasingly popular in everyday business. Mobile devices are used in virtually every industry and have become an integral element of core business processes. Let’s look at the three major ways in which mobility trends impact organizations:

1. Mobile devices use a wide range of differing operating systems

2. Employees are bringing their own devices into the workplace, driving the need for enterprise-grade Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) strategies

3. Consumer applications are mobile, and employees expect business apps to follow

Gartner predicts that by 2014, 90 percent of organizations will support corporate applications on personal mobile devices . In line with these trends, the need for mobile access to RightFax has become a priority. To this end, OpenText teamed up with Cortado, a leading provider of virtual desktop technology.

Cortado Corporate Server
Integrating mobile devices into corporate IT structures poses a challenge to administrators because of the wide variety of devices and their varying operating systems and security features. Cortado Corporate Server provides users with the solution to accommodating different mobile platforms: it gives employees with smartphones and tablet PCs secure access to corporate network resources and allows them to use traditional desktop functions while on the go, just as if they were at their workstation in the office. Users can access files and information on the corporate network at any time with their mobile devices, and either print directly to the nearest printer or send documents via fax. On the backend, the Cortado Corporate Server acts as a mobile device management system and allows secure management of users, profiles, and policies.

Cortado Connector for RightFax
The Cortado Connector for RightFax simply integrates RightFax with the Cortado Corporate Server. This module is the interface between Cortado Corporate Server and RightFax. Utilizing the Cortado software, the module will pick up the Cortado application output files and send them out through the RightFax server. Most common file formats in Windows environments are supported. Fax status reports must be configured within RightFax and can be sent to the fax sender’s mailbox.

Description of the RightFax – Cortado Integration
Cortado Corporate Server’s integration with RightFax allows users with a mobile device or tablet to send documents via fax either from within the office environment or remotely. Cortado enables those documents to be retrieved from a file-share on the organization’s local network or from the local device itself. This overcomes security and compliance issues customers face when they are, for example, out of the office and trying to send a document via fax, but are unable to use the organization’s central RightFax server.

The Result
Cortado Corporate Server and RightFax work together to offer customers numerous benefits:

• Fax documents from a mobile device with ease

• Send any document as a fax – whether from the corporate network, local directories on the device, or as an attachment from an email program

• Trigger and fax up-to-date database reports

• Reduce data traffic by eliminating download of centrally-stored files

• Create fax documents on the fly on your smartphone or tablet PC

• Receive fax status notifications on the device

For organizations, the result of the RightFax and Cortado Corporate Server integration is a solution that brings a reduction in cost and IT administration, while simultaneously increasing productivity, security, and compliance.

RightFax & Cortado: The right fax solution for every BYOD strategy!

Martin van Ginkel
Strategic Alliances Manager EMEA
OpenText Corporation

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:

Question #8: Where can I find good FoIP technical resources?

One of the most respected names and leading authorities on FoIP is Cisco’s David Hanes. These links provide neutral information on FoIP:

• Implementing Fax over IP
• The Emergence of T.38 as the De Fact Standard for FoIP
• Facebook Forum Summary – Fax Over IP (FoIP) Basics, Design and Best Practices 

Question #9: Who is the Market Leader in FoIP?

We don’t mean to toot our own horn, but OpenText is the world leader of FoIP as well as traditional fax servers (source: Davidson Consulting).   Frost and Sullivan, in their November 2010 Enterprise Fax Market Report, announced that OpenText is the fax server market share leader by almost double its nearest competitor.

OpenText RightFax has been successfully deployed across multiple IP networks and SIP trunks. RightFax 10 (released in June of 2011), has many feature enhancements which will assist you with your FoIP deployments. RightFax is also much more than fax. Embedded as part of RightFax is a secure document delivery solution called SecureDocs that allows you to send and track almost any file type securely.

Question #9 and 1/2: Where can I go to discuss FoIP with the experts?

Don’t miss your chance to hear from two of the industry’s leading experts on FoIP: David Hanes; Gonzalo Salgueiro from Cisco – two guys who literally wrote the book on FoIP. Join David and Gonzalo on November 10^th for an educational webinar that will Explore the Roadmap of SIP Trunking for FoIP. You can also view a recording of a recent joint webinar by OpenText and Dialogic Take the Mystery out of SIP Trunking.

Matthew Brine, General Manager
Fax and Document Distribution Group
OpenText Corporation

Joshua Butcher, Senior Technical Instructor
Fax and Document Distribution Group
OpenText Corporation

by Kieran Lane, of Softech, a Premier OpenText Partner and Authorized Support Provider

In this fun video, we staged the ultimate faxing championship: RightFax versus a traditional fax machine. See how RightFax can save you and your coworkers up to 10 minutes for each fax sent. Learn how easy it is to send, receive and confirm faxes without interrupting your other work. With proven return on investment and measurable productivity gains, there may be only one drawback to RightFax—less exercise from stair climbing. Of course with the time and money RightFax saves, going to the gym will be easier too.

Watch the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NohhnGsBXA

For more information on Softech, please visit www.softech.ie or contact Kieran Lane at k.lane@softech.ie

I recently read Wikipedia’s entry on production fax and drew two conclusions: (1) Wikipedia is wrong, sort of, and (2) I must be a word geek for wanting to point that out.

Wikipedia says that production fax is “the process of integrating an electronic fax software application to automate the sending and receiving of fax documents.” That was true some year back, but these days production fax describes outbound technology that allows business to integrate, automate and deliver documents.

Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition, can receive tremendous volumes of faxes, route them, categorize them, insert them into workflows, email them, etc.—all automatically. That’s not generally called production fax anymore, it’s called fax automation. Of course, it doesn’t really matter what you call it … unless you’re a word geek like me, in which case it’s fascinating.

Feel free to make up your own name for it. Like productivity fax, or Oracle-SAP-and-almost-any-system-fax. Okay, that last one was too long. What really matters is how you can leverage it to make your business more profitable, which is explained in about 500 words in this short (3:30) video.

This video is also available for Partners to download as .wmv from Solutions Central. Use this unaltered version on your own website, Youtube channel, or anywhere else you’d like to share this information.

By Darin McGinnes

Why would a communication technology that was conceived in the 19^th Century and perfected in the 20^th Century, still be important today in the 21^st Century? The simple answer: faxing is a guaranteed delivery technology that email has yet to achieve. For those of us who work in the industry, this might be stating the obvious. But for the uninitiated, most believe faxing is practically dead, after all aren’t we in the Information Age? My answer: not so fast, as faxing is still alive and well!

Don’t get me wrong, email is a wonderful, convenient, and easy to use technology that for many businesses that relied on faxing in the past, do not need to use it as much anymore. But if you’re in an industry such as medical, finance, legal, or construction, you know that email isn’t good enough when it comes to delivering or receiving important, time sensitive or legal documents. In this respect, one may wonder why faxing is superior to email. It all comes down to the fact that a fax is considered a legal document because the transaction can be confirmed while email cannot.

Let’s look at how a fax is transmitted vs. email. Email is built upon technology from the internet. It uses packet switch technology, which means it’s unreliable. Not that it’s ineffective, but the sender never knows for sure if the other side received the email as it is sent best effort only. Worse yet, it also could be easily intercepted by unscrupulous types. Faxing, on the other hand, is built upon technology from the tried and true public switched telephone network, the oldest communications network in the world. It uses circuit switch technology, which means that it’s reliable; both parties will know if the fax was sent successfully or not. Also, intercepting a fax transmission is much more difficult. And for those of you who are thinking: what about VOIP? Well, all that’s about is emulating a point-to-point circuit switched phone conversation over the packet switched internet. Circuit switched reliability is still intact.

One may ask if there is a better way to fax. After all, using traditional fax machines can be an unwieldy, inefficient process. Not to mention the difficult, time consuming process of integrating with business applications such as ERP, CRM, or document management systems. My answer to you is the fax server.

Either with an enterprise software solution like Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition or an appliance solution like Open Text Fax Appliance, FaxPress Edition, a fax server shields the inefficiency of sending or receiving faxes from the end user. It allows users to conveniently send and receive faxes from the desktop or leverage existing multifunction printers or scanners to send hard copy faxes. Furthermore fax servers seamlessly integrate with back office business applications that allow customers to realize a true paperless office, bringing the clunky fax into the 21^st century of technology and convenience.

To learn more, download one of our free whitepapers:

Implementing Fax over IP in your Organization

Network Faxing with Open Text Fax Appliance, FaxPress Edition