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.

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

Question #6: What are fax gateways used for?

You can leverage all the benefits and cost advantages of FoIP without a VoIP infrastructure with a fax gateway. A fax gateway allows for scalability and flexibility of the current state by giving an organization the control of integrating or not, into current or future network infrastructure. This may be relevant if you are planning on upgrading your existing fax server or purchasing a fax server and our planning a VoIP implementation in the future. For more information about the value of leveraging a fax gateway see the whitepapers and datasheets at http://faxsolutions.opentext.com/fax-gateway-for-foip.aspx.

Question #7: What is SIP Trunking?

Many companies have started using or are considering a SIP trunk to connect their PBX to the global telephone system infrastructure (PSTN) via the Internet. Unfortunately, not all SIP trunk providers support faxing through their SIP trunks even though many claim they do. Before making a decision to go to a SIP trunk, you will want to be sure to determine exactly which FoIP protocol is supported so that you can decide whether the solution is best for your fax traffic demands. Theblogs  below will provide more information on SIP trunking and its impact on faxing:

• SIP Trunking: Part 1 – Introduction to SIP Trunking
• SIP Trunking: Part 2 – Faxing and SIP Trunking  
• SIP Trunking: Part 3 – Faxing and SIP Trunking, a more complex scenario discussion

The final installment will be posted Wednesday, November 9th. 

Question #4: Are all FoIP Methods Acceptable to use?

Many fax service providers use SMTP (T.37 store-and-forward) as the transport layer for sending and receiving faxes from the fax service to the fax service user.T.37 faxing, even though it is over the Internet, is not the best choice for fax traffic that demand real-time response. According to the technology analyst group Gartner, a fax service may not be suitable if fax traffic is mission critical, time sensitive or contains confidential material due to issues associated with SMTP and service provider security.

Question #5: Can FoIP actually reduce costs?

Choosing a FoIP implementation versus a traditional TDM fax server implementation can reduce costs (including lower energy usage), improve IT efficiency and reduce downtime by consolidating PSTN resources as well as being able to be implemented in virtualized environments. Learn more about the many benefits of FoIP by reading this FoIP whitepaper or visiting http://faxsolutions.opentext.com/fax-over-ip.aspx.

 Part 4 to come on Monday, November 7th.

Question #2: What is the best protocol to use for FoIP?

T.38 is the ITU recommendation for Group 3 (G3) fax transmission between terminals where, in addition to the PSTN, a portion of the transmission path used between G3 facsimile terminals includes an IP network. T.38 has become the accepted standard for FoIP communications, in part because of its multi-level redundancy mechanism to maintain fax integrity as well as its low bandwidth requirements.

Question #3: Who is the leader in T.38 innovations?

The global leader in T.38 technology is Dialogic. What differentiates Dialogic from every other T.38 vendor is their documented interoperability list and the testing that they do to ensure that their technology works across the many different fax machines and gateways in the market today. Dialogic’s FoIP solutions also offer G.711 pass-through as an option to ensure that compatibility with legacy media gateways is still possible.

Important: When choosing a FoIP solution, always ask to see the public interoperability lists and compatibility information supported by the vendor.

Stay tuned for part 3, Wednesday, November 2.

Earlier this year, Matthew Brine wrote an article for Telecom Reseller  that spoke to how fax continues to be an integral part of business today.  The essence of the article was to debunk the myth that fax is obsolescent technology and explain how fax has evolved to assist many companies to reduce their costs, streamline (automate) business processes and improve employee productivity.

A key component driving the evolution of fax technology is fax over IP (FoIP) or IP faxing as it is sometimes called.  Although the concept of FoIP is not new, it can be difficult to find a simple and consistent explanation of FoIP, thus causing confusion and questions.   Some of this confusion is caused by suppliers of FoIP technology in an effort to promote their own products. Consequently, I thought it would be good to provide some information about FoIP and share some resources to help you make the best decision for your company and your fax needs.

Here are 9 ½ questions and answers that will help you gain insight into FoIP:

Question #1: What exactly is FoIP?

FoIP is simply a means of sending and receiving faxes over an IP network. There are basically three different kinds of FoIP protocols that can be used: G.711 pass-through, T.37 store-and-forward and T.38 fax relay.

• G.711 pass-through works just like a voice over IP (VoIP) call where every component of the fax communication is sent in the form of voice packets. If you lose some of those voice packets, the fax can easily be distorted resulting in failed transmissions. Since the traffic is all voice packets, bandwidth demands can be pretty high.

• T.37 store-and-forward works more like an e-mail where the fax content is sent to a mail server to be processed. Unlike the other FoIP protocols this is not real-time, meaning that there is no way for the sender to know whether the fax is actually being received at the same time you are sending it.

• T.38 fax relay only sends just enough voice packets (i.e., tones) for a media gateway to determine whether the call is a fax or not. The rest of the fax tones are then “relayed” from the gateway and not the fax server itself.

Stay tuned for the next post on Monday, October 31st.

By Roopesh Mistry and Ruchir Sharma, Rincon India

It is always a pleasure to meet CxOs of large corporations with a vision to consolidate infrastructure and go green. The Essar Group is a multinational conglomerate and a leading player in the sectors of steel, oil and gas, power, communications and business process outsourcing (BPO), shipping, ports and logistics, projects, and minerals. With operations in more than 25 countries across five continents, the group employs 70,000 people.

When we met Mr. Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Mr. Prasad Patil – DGM IT and the IT team, they were using multiple fax machines of different brands spread across the group and managing these fax machines was proving to be a challenge. They opted for OpenText RightFax as a centralized solution and decided to integrate RightFax with their existing infrastructure i.e. Microsoft Exchange and Avaya VoIP.

With RightFax integrated with MS Exchange, Essar employees manage their faxes directly from the already familiar mail interface. Sent and received faxes are automatically archived for immediate or later use. By integrating RightFax with their Avaya IP infrastructure, RightFax is now on a virtual server with high availability.

We plan to further fax-enable their MS SharePoint collaboration platform, SAP system and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Servers.

Read the complete case study.

By Jim Marrone, Advantage Technologies

A global manufacturing organization based in Ohio was searching for an Enterprise fax solution that could replace all their traditional fax machines, analog phone lines, along with the toner, paper and maintenance costs that went with them.  More significantly, the organization was moving to a virtual environment for all their business applications and had multiple requirements surrounding outgoing communication to their service representatives in the field straight from their Oracle-based ordering system, with an audit trail of the reports being sent and received.

RightFax features and functionality met all the requirements of the project and unlike their competitors, provided the ability to integrate with the existing infrastructure of the company, primarily the financial and customer management systems they utilize.  Leveraging Fax over IP, SR140 software was installed on a virtual server as the communication layer between the IP-based phone system and the RightFax application.  They used the RightFax SMTP/POP3 Gateway to enable outbound faxing from Oracle and inbound delivery of faxes and notifications to MS Exchange users.  Daily reports and service calls are automatically delivered to the field.  The client’s SQL standard database manages all the metadata for auditing purposes and reporting details.

The RightFax solution was installed by Advantage Technologies’s implementation team in one day and the client was provided an additional day of training.  The customer has commented that if all their IT projects went this smooth and actually delivered the ROI promised, like RightFax, his life would be much easier!  For more information on Advantage Technologies visit www.atechnologies.com.

By Chris Schultz, Satori Solutions

The University of Kansas Hospital is one of the United States’ leading academic medical centers. The hospital provides clinical experience and residency positions for students in a multidisciplinary approach to patient care. As a 600-bed facility, the hospital retains more than 4,500 employees and 500 physicians.  To manage the weekly transfer of thousands of medical files, The University of Kansas Hospital relied on dozens of fax machines, multi-function devices, and fax servers. Disparate faxing methods across the organization produced challenges.  According to Keith Anetsberger, assistant administrator with Information Technology Services for The University of Kansas Hospital, inefficiencies and unreliability inherent to hardware-based faxing occasionally impeded employee productivity and patient satisfaction.

The University of Kansas Hospital turned to OpenText Premier Partner, Satori Solutions, for project design, execution and support.  Led by Satori, a team of members from several hospital departments and application vendors consolidated previously separate and unreliable faxing methods into a single, high-availability virtualized RightFax enterprise-wide solution, leveraging Dialogic’s T.38 Fax over IP (FoIP) technology to integrate with their existing Avaya VoIP infrastructure.

Read the complete case study.

Memorial Health System of Colorado Springs started as a community-based hospital that quickly grew to a Level II Trauma Center now consisting of three hospitals and regional clinics. Memorial handles an impressive volume of more than 15,000 faxes per week, both incoming and outgoing. According to Scott Port, Application System Administrator at Memorial, “close to 90 percent of faxes are related to direct patient care.” To support their fax communication load, Memorial relied on nearly 400 fax machines scattered throughout their regional facilities.

With the expert guidance from OpenText Premier Partner Satori Solutions, Memorial turned to RightFax for a more productive, cost-effective method of document management to benefit patient care.

Read the complete case study.