OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

Last week I posted a blog about sending faxes from Outlook Web Access. I received a few questions about it so I figured it was worthy of a video to help explain everything. I really was amazed when I saw this work so well. I would love to hear what you think of this too.

UPDATE: I posted a video about this topic here: http://faxsolutionsblog.opentext.com/2011/09/02/faxing-from-outlook-web-access-video-edition/

This afternoon a colleague asked if I had a working virtual machine with RightFax and the Exchange integration already installed. I did. It’s a new VM I am uploading to our new training-in-the-cloud vendor (more on that soon). He wanted some screenshots showing the process of sending a fax from Outlook Web Access. So I booted up the machines and logged in to OWA for the first time on that VM.

He told me to create an email and send a fax. And I had to pause for a few seconds. Even though I made those videos about addressing a fax, I forgot the proper addressing scheme to use to send an email as a fax. He could tell I was confused so walked me through the process: Open contacts, then add a new contact, and enter the fax number. Save. Now send an email to that contact with the fax number.

He obviously saw that I went from confused to very confused and highly doubtful. Well, thats not going to work (I continued the sentence in my head with the phrase “fool“). He offered to put a wager on whether this would work and while I was confident it would not, I had a feeling he knew something I did not.

I clicked send and flipped over to FaxUtil, getting ready to say, “I told you so”. The fact that I am writing this should probably clue you in to the fact that my expected outcome didn’t come true. The fax worked. It really worked. He told me I had to write a blog about it and let everyone know what a genius he is. I don’t know if I will go that far, but Jaap Jan Pepping does surprise me from time to time.

So why does this work? Well when you send a message and choose to use the fax number, OWA inserts a FAX: at the beginning of the fax number. Our Exchange Connector watches out for addresses that start with RFAX or FAX and forwards them to the RightFax Server. It makes total sense, but I was still amazed that it was so simple to send a fax, even from OWA.

Did you know this? Am I the only one who missed it? Well, I am still excited that this was so easy.

This week, Joshua Butcher has written up a post on Configuring Exchange 2010 UM for Inbound Faxing up on our sister blog: faxsolutions.wordpress.com. Check it out for a great article and links to two videos on the topic.

There is also a new whitepaper available on faxing from Exchange Server 2010 UM available here.