OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

Visit OpenText at HIMSS12 – the largest annual healthcare IT conference and exhibit in the US. Over 20 current and former OpenText staff (including our former and recently retired CEO John Shackleton) will be on hand to showcase our company’s full line of healthcare solutions spanning healthcare records management to secure private health information exchange.

Stop by booth# 2474 at any time to view product demonstrations or to speak with OpenText healthcare experts. We encourage attendees to learn about our solutions and discover how they have helped thousands of healthcare organizations capture and streamline their paper-based clinical and business processes, manage compliance, mitigate risk and enhance delivery of services. If you’d like to schedule an appointment with us during HIMSS12, click here!

To learn more about OpenText healthcare solutions, visit our new healthcare microsite.

OpenText at HIMSS12 (Booth# 2474)
Venetian Sands Expo Center, Las Vegas
Exhibition Dates: Feb. 21 – 24, 2012

• Tuesday, February 21 – 1:00pm -6:00pm
• Wednesday, February 22 – 9:30am-1:00pm & 2:30pm-6:00pm
• Thursday, February 23—9:30am-1:00pm &2:30pm-6:00pm

Get Social at HIMSS12
Make sure you follow us on Twitter (our handle is @faxsolutions) and join the conversation using #HIMSS12 hashtag.

With the desire for the highest quality of patient care in the forefront, healthcare organizations, like yours, are facing many challenges when it comes to secure document delivery and storage. We’ve realized regardless of your size, organizations are looking to technology to reduce cost, safeguard information, maintain the ever-changing regulatory requirements and improve internal workflow processes.

Healthcare IT News wants to know: What are your biggest challenges for developing a centralized digital document delivery strategy that complies with healthcare industry regulations?

Please take part in this five-minute survey, and as a thank you you’ll receive a complimentary copy of the research report that will be published based on your answers.

The recession has hit countries and organizations across the globe for some time now. Each organization has created their own paths and strategies in dealing with these challenging times in an effort to sustain and grow their business; as well as maintain and motivate their employees.

In the 14^th Annual Global CEO survey report published by Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Dennis M Nally, Chairman of Pricewaterhouse Coopers International, opened his foreword with the phrase “Confidence is back”. The report talked about how CEOs have applied cost discipline and patient optimism, setting their targets on immediate growth in recovering regions. CEOs in the survey also identified three focal points to drive change internationally: innovation, talent and a shared agenda with the government (you may wish to read more about this report here: http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/ceo-survey/download.jhtml).

So let’s bring this a little closer to home. What does this mean for us in the fax solutions marketplace? Frost & Sullivan estimates that, in 2010, the enterprise fax marketplace represents approximately $372m in revenues and is expected to grow to $591m globally by 2017. Which begs the question, what would our 3 focal points be to growing our business?

Here’s my take :

1. 1. Innovation

The Oxford Dictionary defines innovation as “a new method, idea, product”. While a new product could and would draw attention, it would also take considerable effort and time. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that we shouldn’t focus on bringing out new products; that should be part of a longer-term roadmap and strategy. But innovation could also mean evolving our existing product range and making it work more efficiently, addressing different aspects of business needs or introducing adjustments to cater to a new market segment.

1. 2. Marketing the products

Aligned with innovation is also how we sell and market the product. This needs to remain in synch with how customers buy. Taking into account cultural and regional nuances will help to put a fresh perspective on how the product and its technologies can help customers address their needs differently. Alternatively, offering prospective customers new ways of capitalizing a tried and proven technology is also important. Also, leveraging social media platforms to encourage ‘getting to know the product through end users’ could translate into a more compelling dialogue with a potential customer. Forming new alliances/partnerships with vendors supporting cloud computing could open new business opportunities is important too.

1. 3. Shared agenda with our customers

The role of selling has changed over time and has impacted the wealth and depth of information easily available online today. Some prospective customers may already have sufficient knowledge of the product and competitive alternatives prior to meeting with you. When we share a common agenda with our customers, we connect ourselves to their environment and needs. This means we can take their knowledge of our product and put it in perspective by addressing it to their requirements. Customers are buying what they need not what we can or want to sell them.

What would your 3 focal points be?

A very Happy New Year to one and all! In an article by Debra Aho Williamson posted on 27 Dec 2010 on eMarketer, she writes that companies will be spending more than ever on social media marketing in 2011. But to succeed in having any sort of depth in a relationship, one needs to engage in a dialogue; share their thoughts, opinions, and experiences. In short, they need to spend time together & communicate. According to Wikipedia, “Human communication was revolutionized with speech perhaps 200,000 years ago^{[citation needed]} while symbols were developed about 30,000 ^[1], and writing making an appearance about 7,000. Telecommunication has run on a much shorter scale, it is only in the past few centuries that there have been major developments in this field.”

The outlets (Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr) currently available to engage in social media seem overwhelming and endless. But social media is not a new thing; we’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Thinking of it this way hopefully puts things in perspective and makes engagement in the field less daunting. Just like the evolution of telecommunication platforms and instruments, the social media platform is a new way of communication. Be wary however, of approaching social media with the notion that it is something you have to do or it can easily become a chore, creating frustration that may lead to overspending just so you can be in the game. Instead, try embracing the new platform using the social networking channels you’re already engaged and in conversantion with. Place more emphasis on the outcome you would like first and you’ll begin to see and experiment with how you can use the new platform.

Start by selecting an area in your business where a social media platform can be easily integrated. For example, when integrating with existing marketing initiatives, consider creating or posting an entry to an existing blog in order to reinforce the theme of a campaign. Promote a webinar or an event and then be sure to continue the conversation afterwards to generate momentum in the discussion of the topic. Additionally, you can raise awareness of your company by contributing articles in external blog forums. If you’re in Product Management and would like to obtain more insight to the environment of your (potential) customer, you can create a social community, like a forum, to encourage regular and informal dialogue.

It is natural for any business to focus on ROI and rightfully so. With so many organizations still testing the waters, the rules of engagement have not yet been fully established within the social media platform. For this reason, if one can first focus on ROO – the return on objectives – one would be able to better develop a sense of ROI over time.

The last few years have shown us that the presence of social media is only growing more prevalent; and the platform will mature even more over time. But don’t worry; it need not be costly or an ordeal as long as you remember that you’re already engaged in social media. The next step is just an update as you integrate a new platform into your existing strategy.

By Jonathan Sze
Director, North American Solutions

A few months ago I was approached by our Global Services team to implement an integrated fax solution for our customer, Dynegy. Dynegy had been implementing their trade confirmation process using Endur® from OpenLink®, the back-office solution used in the various commodity markets for trading, risk management and operations needs.

For years, Dynegy had entrusted Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition as part of their production trade confirmation infrastructure. RightFax ensures secure and automated fax delivery of the trade confirmations to their counterparties. Hundreds of business critical faxes were sent per day for this process alone.

As part of Dynegy’s Open Text ECM Suite rollout, Dynegy recognized a key opportunity to integrate their enterprise content management system with Fax Server: a single, tightly integrated solution will provide dramatic improvements in efficiency and new levels of productivity with their trade confirmation process..

The Solution
As with most enterprise system integration engagements, the key to delivering a successful solution is dependent on both coming up with a robust and scalable design; and an in-depth understanding of our customer’s needs, constraints, business processes and workflows. We had a number of productive scope calls with the Dynegy; and reassured our customer we can easily reduce or even eliminate some of their inefficient manual processes.

We quickly determined our Content Server FaxConnector is indeed the perfect solution for Dynegy. The prepackaged components enable Dynegy to send PDFs along with key metadata, originating from their Endur® system, directly onward to Fax Server. This eliminates the manual entry of recipient information such as fax numbers and “to be faxed” status, along with over fifty different metadata fields. The extensible design of the integration service also allows Dynegy to customize frequency of scan and fax delivery.

Most importantly, the FaxConnector logs and reports all send-fax status back to Content Server for archival – success and failure states, and status timestamps. Understanding exactly what happened with fax transmission is critical for Dynegy – and for most enterprise customers as well – because fax confirmation creates an official record of their business transaction.

The Design
From an architecture standpoint, the Content Server FaxConnector consists of three key components. On the Content Server side, the FaxConnector Module and Sending and Status Services which interface with Enterprise Web Services. Installed on the fax server are a set of Windows services and Fax Server Web Service. The Connector includes a build-in configurator for simple installation and configuration for system administrators.

High Level Architecture of Content Server FaxConnector

Click Image to Expand

Next Version
The upcoming version of our Connector further enhances the extensibility of the integration. A new plug-in architecture enables us to support complex business routing scenarios from Fax Server to Content Server. Businesses who require very specific and controlled mechanism in how fax documents flows into their content management system will be able to take advantage of the new design through customization and extensions. In addition to routing by fax users and DID numbers, for instance, inbound fax documents can also be routed based on text contents from optical character recognition (OCR) process, and be converted to searchable PDFs seamlessly. With outbound faxing from Content Server to Fax Server, we have added address book lookup functionality along with coversheets support.

Conclusion
The integration implementation was delivered very successfully. Our delivery was done on time, and the installation was completed fairly effortlessly. Working with our Global Services Consultant, Riten; and our customer contact Jennifer had been truly a blast. Nothing is more satisfying than having a delighted customer, and seeing the business value of our solution be realized. I have spoken with Jennifer since our engagement delivery, and she is pleased with both our solution as well as how well we have worked with her team throughout the project.

If you are interested in learning more about our Content Server FaxConnector; or if you would like to schedule a live demonstration, please contact us at captaris.ps[at]opentext.com.

Click to read the full case study.

In my previous blog entry we looked at a very simple Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Trunking implementation. In today’s example we will explore a more complex example.

Another customer of ours was looking for a fax solution that would handle the following:

• Allow customers to send faxes to them via a toll free number to a central location
• Redistribute the received faxes to remote locations via their wide area network
• Maintain a redundant site that would be able to send and receive faxes if the main site was down
• Allow the remote sites to send faxes to the main site to be redistributed as necessary

As they began looking at a viable architecture to handle their needs they first looked at deploying a standard telephony based solution. It became immediately clear that this solution would be very expensive and not very flexible. The costs to maintain phone lines as well as to put remote board servers at each of the locations prompted them to explore other options. Based upon their research a SIP Trunk would meet all of their needs at a fraction of the cost.

A SIP trunk would:

• Provide a toll free number into their main location as well as a second redundant location
• Provide service to all of their remote locations
• Terminate all internal fax calls to either the main or redundant location

The only issue was that while the provider could support all of their needs at a reduced cost the SIP Trunk did not support T.38 for faxing. A simplified illustration of the topology is below.

Click to enlarge image.

Because the provider did not offer T.38 it became necessary to utilize a third party gateway as a session border controller to enable T.38 capabilities from the G.711 and G.729 codecs that were being provided.

With the gateway in place, when a fax was sent to an 800 number or to internal numbers associated to the SIP trunk the gateway would:

• Provide T.38 capabilities
• Transcode the G.729 codec to G.711 if necessary
• Pass the call to the SR-140 software on the Open Text Fax Server

Note: Transcoding is a method used by devices to translate one codec type to another. Information received by the gateway from the SIP trunk utilizing a G.729 codec has to be translated into G.711 because the SR-140 software used by the Fax Server must be G.711.

Once received the fax would be routed to the proper user and could be accessed by clients remotely via the WAN connection.

As an organization we expect to see more and more installations that include SIP Trunking. Because SIP Trunking is a fairly new offering there can be issues that arise when utilizing the technology. Purchasing a trunk that supports T.38 will make a FoIP installation much easier. Trunks that do not offer T.38 can still be utilized with faxing but may require additional hardware as outlined in our example.

To learn more about SIP and all aspects associated with Fax over IP we recommend our FoIP Fundamentals online course. For more information on this class or any of the classes offered by the training group please visit our Learning Services Web page.

Advocate BroMenn Medical Center is a full-service, 221-bed hospital serving central Illinois for more than a century. It is staffed by more than 1,800 employees, 350 physicians and 800 volunteers. Efficiency can be elusive when hospitals contend with outdated, manual processes. For BroMenn, incoming physician orders for radiology, cardiology, and surgical procedures previously arrived on fax machines. The Radiology Department alone receives up to 110 orders per day requesting MRIs, CT scans, ultrasounds, or x-rays. Between reduced staff productivity, denied insurance claims, delayed procedures, and patient dissatisfaction, BroMenn needed a solution that could support their overall mission for exceptional patient care and best healthcare practices while improving processes.

By working with Risetime, a Chicago-based solutions provider, to digitize and automate the management of physician orders BroMenn implemented ECM solutions from Open Text and Microsoft. The combined solution which included Open Text Fax Server integrated with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007, Open Text Fax Server Connector for SharePoint 2.0, Risetime Medical Fax Management Solution for SharePoint, and Microsoft Silverlight, has enabled enhanced patient services, improved billing efficiencies for financial stability, and improved employee productivity.

BroMenn is in the process of expanding the pre-screening order process to other areas of the hospital, including cardiology, surgical care, and lab.

Adam Young, Field Project Lead with the Information Systems Department of Advocate BroMenn Medical Center offers advice to other hospitals dealing with paper-based, manual order processing. “If you don’t have a way to manage orders electronically now, Open Text Fax Server integrated with Microsoft SharePoint is one of the best ways to do it.”

Read the Full Case Study.

For additional product information, please visit: http://www.risetime.com/