OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

Fax machine errors cost people a lot of money every year. Today in Augusta, a fax machine error almost cost Luke Donald a chance to win The Masters!

Due to a smudge on the fax paper printout when the machine got the fax of his signed scorecard, it looked like he was claiming a score of three for birdie when he actually hit a five for a bogie.

The error was caught and his wife tweeted, “just got off the phone with Luke. NOT disqualified. Thanks goodness.”

Why do they fax scorecards? Because they have to be signed. A golf scorecard doesn’t just keep score—it prevents fraud and provides an audit trail. It is a legally-binding record of who claimed what score. That is why fax matters so much today. How can you avoid fax machine disaster? Four words: RightFax and Fax Appliance.

Why does a shark like me care about golf? A few reasons. First, sharks love golf. This video of sharks at the 14^th hole in Brisbane proves that!

Plus, there was a famous golfer Greg Norman called the Shark.

Greg Norman "The Shark"

Finally, I’m not just writing about the masters, I’m there!

Fax Shark at The Masters!

The complex and dynamic healthcare IT marketplace was on full display at HIMSS12 in Las Vegas last month. After spending a few days interacting with partners, customers and healthcare IT consumers as a representative of OpenText’s Fax and Document Distribution Group (FDDG), three main trends stood out to me that I feel are important to share with those unable to attend, whether health professionals with IT problems or vendors with IT solutions.

The Cloud
Despite early fears that managing and exchanging sensitive documents like patient information in the cloud would be too unstable or vulnerable, the sentiment is shifting as businesses across all industries become better informed – and consequently more comfortable – with the emerging medium.

Quite a few healthcare IT vendors have done a commendable job of demonstrating that cloud computing can be secure. Although many hospitals and other healthcare providers are realizing they need to step outside of traditional technologies in general, their initial hesitation to embrace cloud is understandable. Many of these institutions have spent a lot of time and money building an IT infrastructure that, while perhaps not as efficient or up-to-date as they would like, makes them feel confident that their sensitive documents are safe. It was great to see more hospitals getting out of their comfort zones and investigating new technologies.

Mobility
To some people, a PDA or other mobile device is simply a phone, a scheduling tool, or even just a neat gadget. But to a growing number of healthcare professionals, these mobile devices have become critical to managing and sharing documents, and, more importantly, delivering quality care.

The continually expanding capabilities and security of mobile devices are making them more and more attractive to healthcare professionals, especially those that need to share sensitive information quickly and without being tied to a desk or a fixed appliance.

HL7 Messaging
Health Level-7 (HL7) messaging is beginning to generate a lot of renewed attention. Originally developed in the U.S. more than 20 years ago as a standard for healthcare information systems, it was quickly adopted by many other nations and remains an important way of managing healthcare information in a unified manner.

Security and compliance has become one of the most daunting challenges for healthcare providers, but their need to communicate quickly and often internationally is growing as well. HL7 is being revisited as a cornerstone for sharing medical records and other health documents.

With these and many other changing trends in mind, our healthcare IT solutions must keep pace. OpenText FDDG will continue to develop document interchange technologies that meet the needs of the Healthcare industry.  Fax remains important, and even as electronic interchange of records grows in Healthcare, fax will still be a backstop.  OpenText continues to put a major focus on secure operability in the cloud, access to critical documents via mobile device, and compatibility with the widest range of applications possible. As Healthcare IT requirements evolve, you can be certain that OpenText will be there to provide superior solutions.

I and several colleagues recently returned from the annual HIMSS tradeshow in Las Vegas. HIMSS is a place where birds of a feather in the healthcare marketplace can meet and learn how healthcare information technology providers can help customers meet their many and varied compliance mandates.

Compliance truly is the central driving factor for healthcare IT consumers, so we spent a lot of time talking to IT personnel, Compliance Officers, and CIOs looking for affordable document management distribution and other IT solutions.  A large amount of our Fax & Document Distribution Group’s business takes place in the document-heavy healthcare industry, so our attendance was vital.

Over the course of the event, we had an opportunity to meet with several of our partners and customers, and to learn from each of them how our products are performing in the real world. It was a valuable chance to gauge the ways in which we are adding value to our customers’ businesses, and to learn more about how we can continue to improve and remain competitive.

I had the pleasure of meeting with many of our partners–for example, GE Healthcare, Vitera, and McKesson–who integrate and resell our fax solutions, RightFax, FaxPress, and Fax Appliance. On top of that, when I was walking the exhibit area, I was very pleasantly surprised at the large number of third parties who have integrated their systems with OpenText fax products independently. To make this even easier, we recently announced an Integration Partners Program to help Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) connect to our products.  If you are an ISV and need to add faxing to your application, you can learn more about our Integration Partner Program here.

To sum up, HIMSS is the place to see and be seen. The value of HIMSS to any ISV is the opportunity it presents to get to know your customer base, and to gather players from both sides of the IT sales process under the same roof. Rather than making a million phone calls, everyone can share new ideas and keep up with regulations together and in real time.

See you there next year!

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:

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.

Who doesn’t enjoy the infectious laughter of a baby? If you’re trying to get through a long and difficult day, it serves as a much needed reminder of the real reason most of us endure the difficult times. More than 9 million people worldwide took time out of their ordinary and stressful lives to watch this little boy break into smiles and giggles. And what could cause the adorable tot to erupt into fits of uncontrollable joy? Ripping a piece of paper. As adults, we know the destruction of paper and the devastation of countless trees is no laughing matter. In the United States, we use enough office paper each year to build a 10-foot high wall that’s 6,815 miles long, or two and a half times the distance from New York to Los Angeles.

The moral of this story is twofold – it’s about saving the planet, trees and resources for future generations, and it’s also about saving money and resources today that affect the profitability of your business. You can locate the recycle bins and make an honest effort to properly dispose of paper, but you can do more. Look at your work environment, whether small business or large enterprise, it’s easier than you think to cut your paper dependency and save a forest or two. Faxing is one area where you can make a big difference. With OpenText RightFax, you can replace traditional, standalone fax machines with a Fax over IP-based solution that turns outdated, paper processes into efficient, digital workflows–reducing the paper, the time and resource to send and receive fax communications. RightFax also helps meet compliance laws by creating an audit trail should you need to locate that all important document.

Green lecture over. Can we go back to the baby now? Reach into the recycle bin and pull out another piece of paper to make him laugh so we can all smile.

My Dearest Valentine,

We’ve been together for nearly 25 years.

I can trust you with all my secrets.

You are reliable and trustworthy, everything I’ve ever dreamed of.

You reduce costs, streamline business processes and improve productivity.

You have extensive tracking, auditing and reporting components.

You integrate with SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and many others.

No one can compare.

It’s no wonder people love you.

You leverage Ricoh, Xerox, Konica Minolta, HP and every other MFD/MFP.

You have a hosted service that is rich, scalable and fully integrated.

Your secure document delivery solution enables certified document exchange between two parties for most file types.

Call centers, mortgage processors, law firms, financial institutions and healthcare organizations love you.

We at OpenText love you.

Companies around the world love you.

You are RightFax, the world’s leading fax server and the fastest growing Internet Fax solution.

–Share your RightFax Valentine poem. We’d love to hear from you.–

If you’re a college football fan you probably know Feb 2^nd is “signing day” when the top high school players commit to big time college football programs. How do these high school football players confirm their choice? With a letter of intent — via fax. Big time college football programs are not willing to wait for signed letters to arrive in the mail, so fax transmissions become top priority on this day.

How important are these faxes to college football programs and fans? According to this article on the Wall Street Journal online the University of Washington set up a Web cam pointing at the fax machine on signing day last year so fans could catch some “can’t-miss football action.” According to the article the Web cam feed was so popular many potential viewers couldn’t get on.

Why would all of these big time college programs, with deep pockets and vast resources, use an older technology like fax? Why not just have these signed letters sent in via email? Two main reasons are that (1) email is too easy to forward or intercept and (2) both sides want confirmation of delivery — which is something email can’t reliably provide.

Using fax to sign high profile athletes isn’t limited to NCAA football. What happens when a top prospective player on your European soccer team can’t get a fax through? Ask the FC Köln football (soccer) club. Just yesterday a top player from Hamburger SV had his transfer deal to FC Köln negated after the fax confirming the transaction arrived late to the German Football League.

Now, back to Brett Favre. How did he let the NFL know he wasn’t (really) retiring in 2008? Via Fax. According to this NY Times article “Favre formally applied for reinstatement to the N.F.L. on Tuesday, faxing a letter to the league office — the first step in a process that could have Favre back wearing his No. 4 Packers jersey, or perhaps in the uniform of another team, later this week. “

Fax continues to play an integral role in our ever day lives – even superstars send faxes one page at a time. If your sports teams have RightFax they probably know the score…

You may have seen in the headlines today that the save-the-date notices for Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding were sent via fax. CNN Entertainment

As the makers of RightFax we think this is great, but some of the media coverage has asked why these were sent via an older technology like fax. Kate and William are obviously a tech savvy couple and the media has already widely covered how they announced their upcoming marriage through social media. So the question is why did they choose fax for these save-the-date announcements?

Here are 5 possible reasons why Buckingham Palace may have chosen to send save-the-date invitations via fax:

• Email is too easy to forward or intercept
• They wanted confirmation of delivery (which email can’t reliably provide)
• Emails can get lost and perhaps Kate and William wanted a physical piece of paper put in the hands of these VIPs
• Fax is still ubiquitous and one of the fastest and easiest ways to get important information into someone’s hands
• By using a fax server (such as RightFax), sending all of these notices as a broadcast would be quick and easy…and again delivered securely, with proof of delivery

What are your thoughts on why Buckingham Palace chose to use fax?

To learn more about how fax is being used today please visit our Future of Fax website – http://www.futureoffax.com/