The United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recently released information detailing data security breaches in Great Britain between March 2011 and February 2012. The report came after a Freedom of Information request by satellite manufacturer/TV broadcaster Viasat.

All businesses in the UK are bound by the Data Protection Act of 1998, which is enforced by the ICO to prevent data breaches of personally identifiable information (PII). However, the report found that while the private sector accounted for more than a third of all reported breaches (263 cases), it paid just one £1,000 fine, leaving the public sector (467 cases) with the vast majority of the £791,000 total.

Data security is a global problem, and insufficient reporting/enforcement makes incidents difficult to accurately track and, more importantly, prevent. Government agencies with a commitment to customer privacy spend a lot of money protecting data to avoid crippling fines, (the ICO levied a £140,000 fine against Midlothian Council in 2011 for repeatedly leaking personal data about children and their caregivers to the wrong recipients).

The security of protected health information (PHI) is a particular risk for healthcare institutions, and in the UK, they must comply with strict regulatory mandates not only from the Data Protection Act but also from their individual Safe Haven Policies. As a result, in the UK and around the world, the smart money is on secure document management and delivery.

The National Health Service (NHS) is the UK’s publically funded healthcare network, and its 1.7 million combined staff serve more than 62 million citizens. NHS Manchester turned to OpenText Fax Appliance for its document delivery solution. Prior to adopting a network fax approach, fax machines were spread out geographically, and security was limited to keeping fax machines in locked rooms. Now NHS Manchester employees enjoy consolidated digital document transfer and can send and receive faxes directly and securely from the desktop. All faxes are stored and routed through a central database, and retain a full audit trail recording any access or other activity. With less paper documents changing hands, the likelihood of data breaches is greatly reduced.

To learn more about Fax Appliance, click here.

To read the full NHS Manchester case study, click here.

Countless businesses use Microsoft Office 365 for everything from email and calendar services to document access and collaboration. They have already shown their smarts and thriftiness by reducing onsite hardware and software and working in the cloud. So why are some still relying on paper-based faxing and the expensive hardware, supplies and maintenance it requires? Maybe they don’t know about RightFax or Fax Appliance.

OpenText helps thousands of small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) around the world manage and deliver their business-critical documents. We have dozens of integration options with the most common back-office and other applications has made it extremely attractive to people who don’t want to buy (or learn) new software. One of the most popular recent integrations is with Office 365.

By integrating Fax Appliance or RightFax with Office 365, customers enjoy immediate upfront savings, increased security, and less time shuffling back and forth between workstations and shared standalone fax machines. In cases where sensitive and/or legally binding documents are required to be sent to third parties, fax machines in public areas produce highly visible paper documents and pose a serious risk to information security – potentially resulting in hefty regulatory fines. Our solutions allow you to manage user roles and permissions and fax from your desktop to erase this threat.

We have seen significant benefits for customers who use OpenText’s rich integration with O365. These include:

• More productive employees: No more time-consuming printing, manual faxing, and tracking.

• Lower telecom, paper, and equipment costs: Consolidate phone resources for faxing and stop paying for fax paper, cartridges, and machine maintenance, eliminate costs for filing, long-term archival and manual retrieval of paper faxes.

• Less fax preparation: Any that can be printed can be faxed.

• Improved efficiency: Send higher quality communication more quickly by faxing directly from  Office 365 via Print-to-Fax or email.

• PDF routing: Route incoming faxes to  Office 365 as PDF attachments.

• MFP integration: Fax through our fax solutions without purchasing phone lines and costly fax kits for multiple MFPs.

• Improved audit, compliance, and legal readiness: Audit trails are legally recognized making it easy to provide proof of compliance.

• Document centralization: Keep all your communications in one place by using the  Office 365 email client to send and receive faxes.

• Support of green initiatives: Save trees (and money) by getting rid of a lot of paper.

That’s just what I can think of off the top of my head – basically, if you’re a SMB that uses Office 365 and also needs to fax, OpenText can help. If savings and security alone aren’t enough to pique your interest learn more about the benefits and integration listing from Fax Appliance and RightFax.

Recently we co-sponsored a well-attended webinar highlighting the current state of security and compliance in the healthcare industry. Speakers Rebecca Herold (the Privacy Professor), privacy, security and compliance guru , and Chris Patterson, IT Administrator at Florida Heart and Vascular Associates, were extremely helpful in enlightening the audience using real-world examples and the most up-to-date data.

We’ve had some time to reflect on the webinar, and also to take a look at the responses to the polling questions. Here are a few realities we can take away from these resources:

■ Security and compliance remain the most important issues in healthcare after quality
patient care

■ The healthcare industry is not yet where it needs to be in terms of securing
private health information

■ Solutions do exist to mitigate the problems

■ Digital fax and document delivery will continue to play a central role in these solutions

The problems
Healthcare providers need to maintain a high level of data security for three main reasons: patient care, patient privacy and regulatory compliance. The rise in the use of fax to securely manage and deliver electronic medical records (EMR) solutions are  helping institutions address these concerns, but even fax is vulnerable to tampering if not properly protected, and data leaks continue to plague the industry.

Rebecca shared several real-life examples of recent breaches in fax security including hacking of fax servers, wrong numbers/email addresses, use of standalone fax machines and public networks, and improper document disposal. These problems come from a mixture of human and technological error and often lead to costly failures of compliance with government mandated regulations like HIPAA and HITECH.

According to the poll, about half of healthcare providers are unsatisfied with their ability to comply with HIPPA using digital documents, and more than half of physicians still rely primarily on paper charts.

The success stories 
The good news is that digital fax and document management solutions like Fax Appliance, RightFax and Alchemy are working for thousands of healthcare professionals, including Patterson. After deploying an OpenText fax solution, Patterson reported that security has improved and the hospital has enjoyed savings of more than $200,000 in the three years since implementation. Patterson also said his fax solution paid for itself within two months and has effectively replaced the work of two-and-a-half full-time employees.

Fax machine errors cost people a lot of money every year. Today in Augusta, a fax machine error almost cost Luke Donald a chance to win The Masters!

Due to a smudge on the fax paper printout when the machine got the fax of his signed scorecard, it looked like he was claiming a score of three for birdie when he actually hit a five for a bogie.

The error was caught and his wife tweeted, “just got off the phone with Luke. NOT disqualified. Thanks goodness.”

Why do they fax scorecards? Because they have to be signed. A golf scorecard doesn’t just keep score—it prevents fraud and provides an audit trail. It is a legally-binding record of who claimed what score. That is why fax matters so much today. How can you avoid fax machine disaster? Four words: RightFax and Fax Appliance.

Why does a shark like me care about golf? A few reasons. First, sharks love golf. This video of sharks at the 14^th hole in Brisbane proves that!

Plus, there was a famous golfer Greg Norman called the Shark.

Greg Norman "The Shark"

Finally, I’m not just writing about the masters, I’m there!

Fax Shark at The Masters!

The complex and dynamic healthcare IT marketplace was on full display at HIMSS12 in Las Vegas last month. After spending a few days interacting with partners, customers and healthcare IT consumers as a representative of OpenText’s Fax and Document Distribution Group (FDDG), three main trends stood out to me that I feel are important to share with those unable to attend, whether health professionals with IT problems or vendors with IT solutions.

The Cloud
Despite early fears that managing and exchanging sensitive documents like patient information in the cloud would be too unstable or vulnerable, the sentiment is shifting as businesses across all industries become better informed – and consequently more comfortable – with the emerging medium.

Quite a few healthcare IT vendors have done a commendable job of demonstrating that cloud computing can be secure. Although many hospitals and other healthcare providers are realizing they need to step outside of traditional technologies in general, their initial hesitation to embrace cloud is understandable. Many of these institutions have spent a lot of time and money building an IT infrastructure that, while perhaps not as efficient or up-to-date as they would like, makes them feel confident that their sensitive documents are safe. It was great to see more hospitals getting out of their comfort zones and investigating new technologies.

Mobility
To some people, a PDA or other mobile device is simply a phone, a scheduling tool, or even just a neat gadget. But to a growing number of healthcare professionals, these mobile devices have become critical to managing and sharing documents, and, more importantly, delivering quality care.

The continually expanding capabilities and security of mobile devices are making them more and more attractive to healthcare professionals, especially those that need to share sensitive information quickly and without being tied to a desk or a fixed appliance.

HL7 Messaging
Health Level-7 (HL7) messaging is beginning to generate a lot of renewed attention. Originally developed in the U.S. more than 20 years ago as a standard for healthcare information systems, it was quickly adopted by many other nations and remains an important way of managing healthcare information in a unified manner.

Security and compliance has become one of the most daunting challenges for healthcare providers, but their need to communicate quickly and often internationally is growing as well. HL7 is being revisited as a cornerstone for sharing medical records and other health documents.

With these and many other changing trends in mind, our healthcare IT solutions must keep pace. OpenText FDDG will continue to develop document interchange technologies that meet the needs of the Healthcare industry.  Fax remains important, and even as electronic interchange of records grows in Healthcare, fax will still be a backstop.  OpenText continues to put a major focus on secure operability in the cloud, access to critical documents via mobile device, and compatibility with the widest range of applications possible. As Healthcare IT requirements evolve, you can be certain that OpenText will be there to provide superior solutions.

After attending this year’s HIMSS tradeshow, I am as excited as ever about the direction healthcare is heading with regard to new information technologies. Even compared to last year’s event, I can see a real difference in the passion healthcare providers are displaying in seeking out new technologies to deliver better care and service–in particular those that can help them address security, compliance and data privacy. Yes, regulations and compliance mandates like HIPAA means a lot more accountability and a lot more work. But rather than responding to this requirement as if they are being forced to comply, the healthcare community seems eager to find the smartest IT solutions for their compliance needs. They understand that, ultimately, regulatory compliance will improve not just document security, but also patient care and even bottom line.

I attended HIMSS12 representing OpenText’s Fax and Document Distribution Group in an effort to connect with customers in need of a fax-based document management solution. HIMSS is designed to make the job of finding the right IT solutions easy, but it can be difficult to find something if you don’t know what you should be looking for. In some cases, people don’t even know that fax technology can be a viable and effective solution for them. For example, at HIMSS12, I met someone who provides consultancy services for hospitals to improve their process workflows, and she said it had never occurred to her that fax could solve problems for her clients. Further discussions with her saw her realize that OpenText fax solutions can help quite a few of her clients increase efficiency and productivity, reduce costs and enhance the service they offer their customers. It felt great to help her, and it was a welcome reminder that trusted fax technology continues to play a pivotal role in the healthcare marketplace.

It was heartening to see a vibrant healthcare IT dialogue at play, and I look forward to attending next year.

I and several colleagues recently returned from the annual HIMSS tradeshow in Las Vegas. HIMSS is a place where birds of a feather in the healthcare marketplace can meet and learn how healthcare information technology providers can help customers meet their many and varied compliance mandates.

Compliance truly is the central driving factor for healthcare IT consumers, so we spent a lot of time talking to IT personnel, Compliance Officers, and CIOs looking for affordable document management distribution and other IT solutions.  A large amount of our Fax & Document Distribution Group’s business takes place in the document-heavy healthcare industry, so our attendance was vital.

Over the course of the event, we had an opportunity to meet with several of our partners and customers, and to learn from each of them how our products are performing in the real world. It was a valuable chance to gauge the ways in which we are adding value to our customers’ businesses, and to learn more about how we can continue to improve and remain competitive.

I had the pleasure of meeting with many of our partners–for example, GE Healthcare, Vitera, and McKesson–who integrate and resell our fax solutions, RightFax, FaxPress, and Fax Appliance. On top of that, when I was walking the exhibit area, I was very pleasantly surprised at the large number of third parties who have integrated their systems with OpenText fax products independently. To make this even easier, we recently announced an Integration Partners Program to help Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) connect to our products.  If you are an ISV and need to add faxing to your application, you can learn more about our Integration Partner Program here.

To sum up, HIMSS is the place to see and be seen. The value of HIMSS to any ISV is the opportunity it presents to get to know your customer base, and to gather players from both sides of the IT sales process under the same roof. Rather than making a million phone calls, everyone can share new ideas and keep up with regulations together and in real time.

See you there next year!

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.

At this year’s OpenText Global Fax Summit, Senior Product Manager Geoff Anderson and Senior Director of R&D, Treber Rebert, presented “The OpenText Fax Solutions Roadmap” to a room packed full of customers, partners and OTFDDG employees.  They focused on the future without forgetting the past: not only have we improved our long standing flagship product (23 releases in 25 years) but, perhaps for the first time in our history, are well on the way to paving the road to providing new products and new features only one month after a major release.  Despite releasing RightFax 10 a little over a month ago we already have an SR near ready to be released and new features able to be demonstrated. 

A few key highlight are: support for IE 9 (due out in RF 10 SR1 in the coming days), a cleanup of the RF Certified Delivery web UI, demonstration of image enhancement features (using the world class OCR technology included in RightFax from the Open Text Document Capture group) along with a new hierarchical file structure for image storage. 

The highlight of the product demonstration was a new cutting edge transfer technology that will allow registered RightFax customers to transfer files at 10 to 100 times their current faxing speed.  Imagine a world where secure traceable file transfer is as ubiquitous and easy to use as current day fax—that world is not far off.  Though there was clapping and positive comments for a variety of the features that Geoff presented it was this feature, code named ORCA, that really brought down the house and generated question after question.  Proof that the OpenText Fax and Document Distribution group continues to bring “Fax Goodness” to our customers current and future. 

 For more information on RightFax 10 visit the OpenText Fax and Document Distribution web site at: http://faxsolutions.opentext.com/rightfax-10-whats-new.aspx

Hello, I’m Michael Stover, and I’m a Technical Product Specialist here at OpenText, specializing in the Fax Appliance product line.  Fax Appliance 1.0 represents a simple turnkey solution for small to medium business faxing needs.  Feature Pack 1 is loaded with new functionality including DTMF Routing, Fax Forwarding, Fax Routing, Global Contacts and much more.  I’ve created this blog post to introduce you to two new features in Fax Appliance A10x 1.0 Feature Pack 1; Drop Directory for automated outbound fax delivery and the Fax Appliance SDK.  With this release, systems integrators will be able to write customized programming to allow the fax appliance to transmit faxes on behalf of other applications.

Drop Directory

Drop Directory will allow easy deployment of automated, outbound faxing in almost any environment.  In other words, the drop directory feature enables the fax appliance to send faxes without any user intervention.  Fax Appliance has simplified automated faxing through the use of a simple XML control file placed into network share that Fax Appliance monitors called the drop directory.  Once you upgrade to Feature Pack 1, the administrator will be able to easily set up the drop directory and set Fax Appliance to regularly poll it for fax documents to be sent.  To use Fax Appliance’s drop directory functionality, a third-party application, backend system, or device must send the XML control file to the share that has been set up by the administrator.  The XML control file supports eight unique fields that can be used to determine the sender, recipient(s), time of delivery, and which document(s) that will be faxed as part of a specific fax.  With this new functionality you will be able to automate the sending of any native document format that is supported by Fax Appliance.

Fax Appliance SDK

With Feature Pack 1, OpenText is introducing a Web Services SDK to allow developers to write code with Fax Appliance’s API to make fax functionality appear native to their own application(s).  By releasing the Fax Appliance Web Services SDK we are lowering the barriers to entry for systems integrators to provide a high level of interoperability between their own unique systems and Fax Appliance.  Fax Appliance has been designed and built, by the leaders in the fax market, from the ground up to offer the best user faxing experience possible.  That same API is now available to systems integrators and should offer the easiest method of interoperability and integration available anywhere.  With the SDK you will be able to perform several functions; from adding and removing users, sending and receiving faxes, as well as applying custom tagging to your fax documents which will allow your third party program to quickly determine which documents need to be processed.  Support for the Fax Appliance SDK is provided by the OpenText Developer Network and our Professional Services team.