OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

By Matthew Brine

Casey’s furniture, a family-owned business founded in 1921, is one of the longest-standing furniture retailers in Ireland. Their manual paper-based order fulfillment processes were causing costly delays, inefficiencies and errors. Many of the errors were expensive to fix and caused long delays for customers. Some employees were spending the equivalent of a full day per week on paper-based busywork to keep the business running.

Casey’s worked with Inpute Technologies, an Open Text Fax and Document solutions partner in Ireland, to digitize and streamline their order fulfillment process with an integrated, paper-free content solution utilizing Microsoft and Open Text technologies.

Casey’s orders are now routed for approval by Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Open Text Workflow Server, .NET edition and then electronically faxed to suppliers via Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition. Finally, they are stored in an accessible, easy-to-manage digital database with Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition. Employees also have the benefit of being able to send and receive faxes directly from their desktop and to utilize many of the other features of RightFax and Alchemy.

RightFax is the world’s leading fax server for sending and receiving mission critical documents such as purchase orders, invoices and legal agreements where secure transmission and proof of delivery is required. RightFax is used to reduce costs associated with standalone fax machines and paper-based processes.

RightFax has extensive integrations and product certifications with Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and other business applications and is the product of choice for unified communication vendors such as Cisco and MFP vendors like HP, Ricoh and Xerox. RightFax is a leader in production fax and FoIP (fax over IP) solutions and has over 100,000 servers installed worldwide.

Alchemy is a cost effective document imaging and archive solution for departments, work groups and small-to-medium businesses. Alchemy creates a digital file cabinet for your organization so you can securely store any document type and then find it within seconds, even years later. Thousands of customers use Alchemy today because it is easy to install, configure and use.

Among other results, Casey’s Furniture:

Eliminated fax machines and unessential printing for a reduction in printing and stationery costs of more than 60%.

• Reduced average time for order delivery to suppliers by up to eight days.
• Increased profit margins by meeting discount deadlines and reducing duplicate orders.
• Reduced order-related busywork close to 20 percent.
• Sped response time to customer inquiries by up to two weeks

Casey’s Furniture also improved customer service by increasing quality control and consistency of order-related processes, minimized redundant tasks across branches with central, integrated management and supported distribution efficiency with accurate, accessible information.

To read the full Casey’s Furniture customer success story, go to Casey’s Furniture Success Story.

Do you have a customer success story around RightFax or Alchemy? I would love to hear about it. You can contact me at mbrine[at]opentext.com and you can follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/mattbrine.

Matthew Brine
Vice President
Fax and Document Distribution Group
Open Text Corporation

http://faxsolutions.opentext.com/ and http://www.futureoffax.com/

Recently I got the following comment on Twitter, regarding my post on building a custom MMC for building Alchemy databases remotely:

Can the mmc trick be implemented to add db’s to Alchemy Server instead of havin to do it manually? or, can it be automated?

The problem is that albatch can only really do what the Administrator application can do. The only real way around that is to use the API, and specifically the AuServerApi. You can use this in whatever language you like. Perhaps Powershell is convenient for you, or VB/VB.Net, or something else. I like to use C# with the Alchemy API. So below is some code for creating a database and then adding it to the Alchemy Server. I wrote this a few years ago for the Captaris Partner Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

As you can see, actually adding the database to the server is as simple as connecting to the server and then calling AddDatabase.

static Alchemy.Application auApp = new Alchemy.Application();
static AuServerApi.ApplicationClass auServer = new AuServerApi.ApplicationClass();

if (args.Length>0)
{

	string dbName = args[0];
	if (dbName.ToLower().EndsWith(".ald"))
		dbName = dbName.Substring(0, dbName.IndexOf("."));

	string dbPath = "c:\\databases\\" + dbName + ".ald";

	Alchemy.Database auDB = auApp.CreateDatabase(dbPath, dbName, "", false, "", "", "", false);

	auApp.Databases.Remove(dbPath);

	auDB.Logout();
	auServer.Connect("capadev", 0, 0, 0);
	auServer.AddDatabase(dbPath);
}
else
	Console.WriteLine("Please enter a database name");

I hope this is helpful. If you have any questions about any other Rightfax or Alchemy topics (or Workflow), let me know. You can do that on here or contacting me on Twitter where I am technovangelist.

With the holidays just around the corner we find the amount of mail we receive sky-rocketing. From greetings cards to catalogs and brochures, it’s not long before the paper mountain starts taking shape. Depending on where you live in the world your own letterbox maybe a slot in the front door or, a box outside your home or, on the street. These designs have been around for years and continue to serve as a dependable way for homes to collect their mail. The common mailbox however, was never designed to act as a long term storage area for mail. Depending on your own particular model they either become full or, prevent you from being able to open your front door. For most of us this never becomes an issue as we continue to use a tried and tested process to manage our mail. This process normally involves removing the mail from the collection point, distributing items to particular people in the household and recycling those pieces we no longer need. When managing e-mail we adopt similar processes that enable us to store and manage emails away from the server. So why do so many companies continue to burden their fax servers with the long term accumulation of faxes at the point of capture? While the prospect of succumbing to a lethal avalanche of kitchenware catalogs is unlikely, mistaking your fax server for a document repository can have some negative effects of its own.

Compliance Considerations

Let’s talk about compliance for a minute. Compliance may be a term that many of us have become anesthetized to, but the fact remains that non-compliance can be costly and potentially fatal to a business. Whether compliance relates to specific regulations, audit requests or legal discovery, a company’s ability to provide faxes related to a given transaction, process or case can mean the difference between a negligible business interruption and operational standstill. Unfortunately, solutions for compliance only reach the top of an organization’s priority list once they find themselves subject to fines and legal action, by which point it’s often too late. (We have published a new white paper on how fax servers are critical for compliance efforts.)

Efficiently Managing and Archiving Fax Documents

Compliance aside, there are other reasons that should motivate an organization to transition documents away from the fax server and into a secure, searchable and auditable repository. How a business categorizes its faxes impacts how usable and “findable” those faxes becomes in the future. By leaving documents on the fax server we are essentially categorizing information by fax recipient. So what happens when an employee takes on a new position or separates from the organization? Given the volume of faxes that can be received each day how quickly can we really find that individual fax that references the customer account number solely in the body of the document? Searching for faxes in these scenarios can quickly become distracting and more importantly, expensive. It’s also worth considering that not having the right information to hand can quickly result in an organization finding itself at a strategic disadvantage in negotiations and business conflicts.

Just like that trusty mail box and the corporate e-mail server, the fax server was never designed to act as a long term repository so, relying on it to sort, manage, secure and share documents is a strategy we might all consider avoiding. One strategy worth considering however is that of fax archiving. Fax archives not only provide a long term storage solution for fax documents but also dramatically increase the value of the faxes themselves. By attaching a document archive they are quickly able to:

• Create secure repositories for fax storage
• Audit document access and usage by user
• Use OCR to extract text from fax images, making them highly searchable
• Age, retain and dispose of faxes according to company policy or regulation
• Share fax documents across the organization
• Make documents accessible in Microsoft SharePoint and across the web
• Relate faxes to other business documents
• Create and distribute offline fax archives to third parties
• Refocus Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition on executing fax capture and management processes versus fax storage

Many Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition users pair Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition with their fax server. To decide if your organization will benefit from implementing a fax archive, ask yourself the following questions:

• Could your company ever find itself having to fulfill requests to provide fax documents to a third party such as an auditor, legal counsel or regulatory body?
• Are your faxes subject to regulations or policies that dictate their retention and/or disposition?
• Do faxes need to be shared amongst users in order to execute or support a business process?

If you answered YES to one or more of these questions you might consider attaching a document archive to your fax server. For a datasheet on Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition visit here.

We also have an updated overview on the Document Server, Alchemy Edition Connector for Fax Server, RightFax Edition available here.

Written by Darren Boynton with the Open Text Fax and Document Distribution Group.

Did you know that you can create a custom management interface for pretty much any Windows application with zero coding? Did you realize that you probably already have all the tools needed to get this done on your Windows workstation? Well you do, assuming your version of Windows was created in the last 10 to 15 years. The Microsoft Management Console, or MMC, was first made available for NT4 and Windows 9x and is the framework on which many built-in and 3rd party management tools are based. Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition ships with a few MMC-based tools, including the Server Console, and the Web management tools. The reason I am tell you about this is that it was the solution to an interesting issue a customer asked me about recently.

You see, they had a decent number of people who would be contributing information to an Alchemy repository. But after the training I delivered, they realized that the Administrator application gives those who use it a bit too much power, especially when it comes to completely destroying a database. The problem is that the Administrator is the only client application that can initiate a Build. So if they end up using Index Station for most of their users, how do they trigger a Build?

At first I suggested Scheduled Tasks. You can create a task that saves credentials and then can be run from the command line. The command I was going to run was albatch, which is a command line driven tool that comes out of the box with Alchemy. Unfortunately I couldn’t get albatch to work on a remote machine. Even with a SysInternals tool called psexec, I still couldn’t get anything going. So that’s when I remembered the MMC approach. I’ll explain both psexec and albatch in more detail in a short while.

My first experiment with MMC was when I was in the Education Marketing Group at Microsoft. I spent a good deal of time building cool demos of the technology that was part of Windows 2000. One of those demos involved allowing a group administrator or receptionist to reset the passwords of the workers in their group. That’s a function you can perform from Active Directory Users & Computers, but that’s a pretty daunting tool to use. If you create a new MMC and add the AD U&C Snap-In, you can drill down to a specific group or OU. Once there you create a taskpad when displaying a list of users, save the view and you have a custom password reset tool that can cause no extra problems. You can create this tool from scratch in less than 2 minutes with zero coding. I think that is pretty cool.

The tool I wanted to create for Building Alchemy was the Alchemy Builder Console, with one button each for building the databases in my environment. Here is a picture of the console configured to build just a single repository.

So how do you create this? Well, I am glad you asked. The first step is to launch MMC. Close the tree and maximize the main window. On the Menu bar, click Action and choose New TaskPad View. For this simple MMC, I like to use No List for the style. Next your way through the rest of the windows, giving the MMC a name along the way. When it comes to creating the first task, choose Shell Command. This tells the MMC that when you click on the button, you are going to run a command at the command prompt. So what is that command going to be?

This is where psexec and albatch come into view. Albatch comes with Alchemy and provides command-line access to many of the features of the product. The parameters are as follows:

albatch <database-path> /<command> <other-parameters>

So to build a server controlled database called Total on a server named Server, I need to run:

albatch alchemy://server/total.ald /build

That command works fine if you are on the server, but I need to run it from a remote PC. To run the command remotely, I can run psexec which is in the pstools suite from SysInternals.

In case you haven’t heard of SysInternals, go to their site now and read about all of their tools. Every single one of them is useful. As you can see in the screenshot below, psexec allows me to run an executable on a remote machine. Since I will be running this MMC on other PCs, I need psexec to be able to access albatch on the server.

Of course, you can’t run any command on any machine on your network without a valid username and password. So I created a local user on my server called albuilder. With that in mind, the command I used to run albatch is:

psexec \\server /u alcbuilder /p password "c:\program files\captaris\alchemy\albatch.exe" alchemy://server/total.ald /build

If the program completes with an error code of 0, you know that it ran without any problems. Now that i have a valid command, I can plug that into the shell command dialog in the MMC. To get the screenshot about, I went to the View | Customize window and turned off a few features. I also went to the File menu then Options. From there, choose User Mode Single Window and give the console a name. You can also change the icon if you want.

If you want to see a video walk-through of the entire process, check out the video on our YouTube channel.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfrKY4qgdlQ]

The video also shows how to create a custom Event Viewer, as well as a modified Alchemy Server Console that allows you to pick a database from the list and then click the build task. It uses the parameter parsing features of batch files that I had never seen before.

I hope you find this post and the YouTube video useful. If you have any questions, post them here. Also, if you have any ideas for future videos, let me know. Some ideas I am working on include setting up NLB for Shared Services, setting up a Cisco 2611XM router for simple FoIP, using SQL Profiler to get a view of what RightFax does behind the scenes, and more. Come back to this site often to see more from us on these topics.