OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

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.

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.

When I posted the latest video about the Open Text Fax Appliance A102 and A104 last week, one of the comments came from Wendy who asked about the reporting thats built in to the device. There is a brief shot of the reports in that video, but I though I would delve into it just a bit further here. First off, here is her question:

Can you please let me know what the reporting functionality is. Can a report be run daily, weekly, quarterly as to how many faxes have been received or sent down to the detail of reporting on how many faxes to or from specific numbers?

Yes, yes, yes, yes,….and yes. I think I covered it all in that sentence. The reporting in the Fax Appliance is very easy to use and provides just the right information that the target customer would need. The report is available to any administrator of the appliance and is under the tab marked Reports. When you run a report, it defaults to showing you everything. All faxes sent and received. Here is a screenshot of that report:

Here I can see that 29 faxes have been sent and received. I can see who was the owner on the appliance, what was the name on the TTI line for received faxes, when was it sent or received, how many pages, and more. I could have changed the Start and End Dates to whatever time period I care about: today’s faxes, this week’s, quarter’s, or year’s faxes.

If I want to narrow it down further, I can ask it to show me all faxes to and from the NYC area code by typing 1212 in the Contains field and clicking Generate:

Alternatively I can change that Contains field to show a user name on the system:

Actually, any text that shows up in the report can be typed into the Contains field and we will filter down the results to show just that information.

I hope that clears up the reporting capability built into this great little appliance. If you have any further questions, leave them for me here in the comments below. Or contact me on Twitter where I go by the name technovangelist.

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.

The Fax Appliance A102 and A104 are so incredibly easy to setup and configure as I have demonstrated in this brand new video available now on our YouTube channel:

I was able to go from the shipping box to faxing in less than 5 minutes. And that includes configuring a few users, letting other users create themselves as needed, setting in-bound routing, integrating MFP’s and printers, and more. Add a few more minutes to create a custom cover sheet. It’s really cool and this video shows some of that along with what its like to send and receive faxes from the brand new Fax Appliance. Check it out.

If you have other ideas for future videos, share them with me here in the comments. Or contact me on twitter where I go by the name technovangelist.

EDIT: Somehow I managed to forget to include information on the notifications that you get from the Appliance when you receive a fax. Thanks to JJ in the comments below for pointing it out to me. Look to this article right here on the FaxSolutions Blog for an example of one of those emails.