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.