OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

Last week I asked you how you could find a fax image that belonged to a fax. On Friday, I gave part one of the answer, and today I’ll give you part two of the answer. The first way was to press ALT-F10. When you are in FaxUtil and press ALT F10, you will get lots of information about that fax, like when it came in, what channel it came in on, and how it was processed by the server.

Now for the second way to get this information: FAXDUMP. Are you familiar with that? FAXDUMP is one of the Administrator Utilities. You can find it at c:\program files\RightFax\AdminUtils\Faxdump.exe (assuming of course you have installed RightFax to c:\program files\RightFax). If you don’t have an AdminUtils directory, go to the RightFax Installation Wizard under the Windows Control Panel where you add and remove programs, choose to modify your installation, and add the Administrator Utilities. If you are on RightFax 9.3 or earlier, then download the AdminUtils from the OpenText Knowledge Center.

FaxDump is designed to give you detailed information about all the faxes on your system. And since it’s a command line driven app, you can very easily integrate it into all of your other applications that may need access to this info. Here is a simple command you can run:

FAXDUMP -ftrnsrv -l2 -omyfaxes.txt -h

This will dump out a CSV file to myfaxes.txt listing out information like Owner ID, To Fax Num, Fax Date and Time, Channel Used, Number of Pages, and the filenames for the cover sheet and the body. Here are all the command line options for FaxDump that I think are important:

-f{fax server name} 

	Server name for your fax server. In my case above, trnsrv is 

	the name of my fax server

-a{userID}

	User ID you want to use to access the server. It should be a 

	user with administrator privileges. If you are using 

	NT Authentication, skip this.

-p{password}

	userID's password. Again, if using NT Authentication, skip this

-smm/dd/yyyy

	The starting date for faxes you want to dump out. Note the 

	4 digit year.

-s-{dayOffset}

	Instead of a starting date, you can also enter a date offset. 

	So -s-7 means 7 days ago.

-emm/dd/yyyy

	The ending date for faxes you want to dump out. Note the 4 

	digit year.

-e-{dayOffset}

	Instead of a ending date, you can also enter a date offset. 

	So -e-7 means 7 days ago.

-u{userList} 

	Comma separated list of users you want to generate the dump for. 

	Leave this out for all users. -uadministrator,matt,joe means 

	dump all the faxes for those three users.

-g{groupID}

	Just dump for faxes for a given userid, like -geveryone

-o{outputFileName}

	Output the CSV data to a file name instead of the screen.

-l{infoLevel}

	This defines what kind of information you want to dump. I 

	find level 2 to be the most useful, but you can run FaxDump -q 

	to get a list of all the levels

-h

	Output a header on the first line, listing out all the field 

	types. Very useful!

There are a few other options, like -t, -i, -d, and -1, but I don’t find them to be very useful. Once you have a text file, you can open it up in Microsoft Excel or just archive it away. In fact, one great use for this is to run the command before an archive. Now you have a kind of table of contents of your fax server going back in time. I think that could be pretty useful.

Do you use FaxDump? Do you use another tool I have forgotten about? Tell me about it here in the comments. I would love to hear from you.

A couple days ago I asked for your ideas about how to figure out which fax image corresponds to a fax. I am sure you all had an idea about this but were just waiting for me to post the first answer. So here it is.

One of the easiest ways to figure out which image belongs to a fax is built in to the FaxUtil client. Just press the keyboard shortcut Alt-F10 (Press and hold the Alt key on your keyboard, then press the F10 function key at the top of the keyboard). I’ve just pressed Alt-F10 for one of my faxes in FaxUtil and this is the dialog I get:

As you can see, there is a lot of information in this dialog. In fact, it’s a key dialog used in the troubleshooting of any fax server issues. Right in the middle of this screen shot is the property Fax Filename. The value is 0000004A. Although that sounds pretty cryptic, check out the Image directory where ever you installed RightFax to. This is probably one of the following two directories:

c:\Program Files\RightFax\Image

c:\Program Files (x86)\RightFax\Image)

Here is my Image directory. There you can see 3 files with a 0000004A filename, but with three different extensions: .301, .302, and .303. The .301 file is the first page of the fax body. .302, .303, etc are each page after that.

Can we tell anything from this information about whether this is an incoming or outgoing fax? Yes. we can. The fax file name starts with a number rather than a letter pair. That tells us it is an outgoing fax. Perhaps I’ll go into that topic a bit more in a future post.

But there are a few other ways to figure out which image corresponds to a fax. Can you think of one of those way? Leave a comment here on the blog. I’ll post another answer on Monday and hopefully before then you will have posted your answer as well.

These are some of the topics that we cover in our in-depth RightFax courses, held both in a classroom and online. Join us for one and become a RightFax Expert! For information on our courses, visit the FaxSolutions Learning Services web page.

I have posted the second part of the answer as well.

One of the questions that comes up every now and then is how to OCR a fax. And then when they figure it out, they wonder why it might not look so good. Well, the OCR cannot work magic, but due to the OCR engine we use it works a lot better than most of our competition. When I scan in a document at home for OCR, it really needs to be at 600 DPI to get a great result. But faxes, even at fine resolution, are closer to 200 DPI (Its actually lines per inch, but lets not get too detailed). But one of the big benefits of Captaris’ acquisition of Oce Document Technologies a few years back was the OCR engine. This was then rolled into RightFax just before the OpenText acquisition of Captaris.

Although its tough for an OCR engine to recognize anything at 200 lines per inch, the RecoStar engine (thats the name of the technology we own) does an incredible job. But when a fax comes in at 100 lines per inch, the level of recognition drops a bit.

There are a few reasons why OCR might not be available to you users, depending on permissions, and maybe configuration in the workserver or Captaris Conversion Engine. This video is targeting the end user and explains how to use the OCR feature. Check it out, show it to your end users, and let me know what you think.