OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

Managing excessive paper-based medical records is not for the faint of heart — especially when compliance violations can result in fines that well exceed seven figures. Healthcare organizations that employ a virtually “paperless” EMR or EHR solution may believe that they are immune to penalties but that’s simply not the case. Send a fax to the wrong person or leave a fax in whole or part at an unattended fax machine and you could be subject to costly fines. In fact, the number and amount of compliancy fines in the US is at an all-time high.

Join OpenText on April 12th at 2:00PM Eastern / 11:00AM Pacific for an educational webinar, where you will hear from security and privacy expert Rebecca Herold, AKA the Privacy Professor, and learn about the risks associated with paper-based communications and processes. During the webcast, attendees will also hear from Chris Patterson, the IT Administrator for Florida Heart and Vascular Associates, and see how they integrated an OpenText digital faxing solution to achieve HIPAA compliance, improve processes, and dramatically lower costs.

Who should attend?

• Healthcare Compliance Officers adopting new healthcare compliance initiatives
• Healthcare Professionals wanting to protect and secure patient information
• Healthcare Practice Managers seeking to improve productivity and patient care
• Healthcare Informatics roles searching for ways to improve workflow and streamline business processes

Register today!

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.

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.

OpenText RightFax exhibited at Cisco Live 2011 in Las Vegas, NV from 7/10 to 7/14.  As a Preferred Solution Developer member in the Cisco Solution Developer Network (CDN), OpenText RightFax is a recognized leader in providing IP faxing solutions to Cisco clients and partners.  This year’s exhibit hall discussions included our completed RightFax and CUCM 8.x interoperability, as well as our recently certified RightFax 10 Branch Office interoperability with the Cisco UCS Express/SRE-V platform.  The combined Cisco and OpenText RightFax solution supports organizational requirements at the branch office where application survivability and compliancy are requirements. 

Cisco Live was a great success for OpenText and we were able to discuss RightFax with existing clients, interested organizations, and partners alike.  Telecom Reseller took an interest as well.  Listen to the Telecom Resller podcast/interview.

Learn more about RightFax at www.rightfax.com.

How’s that for a title? This blog came out of a question a student asked me in last weeks RightFax class in our Hoofddorp, NL office. He asked about recognizing a plus sign in the phone number. As usual, I had an answer right away for him and told him we would try it out when we got to dialing rules. And when we got there…well, my answer didn’t work. ACK!!! When something like this happens, I like to investigate and then produce a blog or maybe even a video. And here we are.

But before I get to the problem and solution, let me remind you what Dialing Rules are. Basically they allow the fax server to manipulate the fax number that was entered when the outgoing fax was created. Sometimes you want the fax to go out through a special server on a special channel, depending on the sender’s status in the organization, or the time of day, or the country the fax is being sent to, or the size of the fax, or even how busy the local fax server is. All of that and a whole lot more is possible with Dialing Rules. They are really cool!!!

So what about this question of the plus sign? Well, the documentation talks about using a plus in a Dialing Rule pattern as a kind of universal wildcard. When a plus is in the rule, we ignore all other numbers and just apply the rule. Using a plus for a wildcard makes sense because in the US, plus signs never show up in a phone number. Having grown up in Miami with family in the UK, I know that the only way anyone dials an international number is to dial 011, then the country code. We called my grandmother every week and the number starts with 01144 and then a bunch of other numbers I can’t remember. Everyone knows that and if its true in the US, it HAS to be true everywhere else, right?

It wasn’t until I moved to Europe that I realised that the US was in fact the ONLY country on the ENTIRE PLANET that wouldn’t dial that number as +44 and then the rest of the numbers to call my grandmother. OK, my grandmother was never that popular, but you get the idea. Everyone else uses a plus and then the country code. If you don’t have a plus button on your phone, then its two zeros. Roughly half of one percent of the countries of the world use 011 for international. So being able to put a plus sign in the dialing rule is actually pretty important.

But again, a plus sign on its own in a Dialing Rule pattern is a universal wildcard. It matches everything. So when you put a plus sign at the beginning of the rule, every possible fax number is a match. If i have a pattern that is +44123456789, then all outgoing fax numbers will match, even 987654321123456789987654321 or 8675309.

So what’s the answer? Well I assumed that the answer was to put a 00 at the beginning instead of that + sign. That does work if I am using 00 in my fax, but Rightfax does not translate the + to 00. The solution to this problem was buried in an old Knowledge Center article that talked about RightFax 8.7. In that older version, you needed to add some keys to the registry, but thats not necessary anymore. It turns out that you can simply escape the + with a backslash. So \+, then the country code and the numbers is the right pattern to use for an international number for the other 99.95 percent of the world.

Lets say we have a fax server in my Amsterdam office. Most people will copy a recipients fax number into their phone book using the full international number. But when dialing locally, you usually just dial 0, then the rest of the nine digits of the number. So to call +31 123456789, you would actually dial 0123456789 when in the Netherlands, but the +31 version everywhere else (except the US). To deal with this automatically, create a dialing rule pattern of \+31?????????. Then go to number adjustments, remove the first 3 digits, and add a 0 at the beginning.

When we try to send a fax to +31123456789, we can see that 031123456789 is actually dialed.

Maybe you have a deal worked out with your phone company that all calls from one office get a good rate for international calls, but all the other offices make mostly local calls. When a fax needs to go out to a different country, have it sent over the WAN to the other office and go out onto the PSTN there. You could create a rule that looks for all numbers that start with a plus.

As you can see, a plus sign isnt always a plus sign, especially when the plus should be a plus.

Are you using plus signs in your dialing rules? Did you already know about this? If this is useful, let me know in the comments below. You can also contact me on Twitter where I go by the name technovangelist.

OpenText RightFax 10 Adds Enhanced Support for Cloud-based Office Systems

Major Release Marks 25^th Anniversary of OpenText’s Fax Server Software, Key Analyst Report Names OpenText the Industry Leader in Fax over IP

Waterloo, ON. – June 8, 2011 – OpenText™ (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTC) today announced that its industry-leading fax server software now includes enhanced security for sending and receiving  faxes from cloud-based office systems including Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps with the release of OpenText RightFax 10.

As companies of all sizes look to cloud-based office application suites such as Microsoft Office 365 or Google Apps, the ability to securely send and receive faxes through these services will be critical, while also retaining integration with other parts of the organization. Adding to its cloud support, RightFax Web Access is now included with all systems, allowing users to access their RightFax server from a Web browser.

RightFax 10 marks the kick-off of the 25^th anniversary year for RightFax and represents a significant milestone in the product’s history.  In addition to enhanced support for cloud-based office systems, the new release makes it easier, faster and more secure for customers to integrate faxing into their business processes and workflows with new features such as barcode routing, searchable PDF delivery and enhanced Microsoft Outlook 2010 and Lotus Notes 8.5 integration. It also adds optional accessibility support that meets mandates under the Americans with Disabilities Act

OpenText is the leading overall fax server supplier and the leading supplier in the fast-growing fax over IP (FoIP) market, according to a recently released report called Fax over IP Server Markets: 2010-2015 authored by Davidson Consulting, an independent fax industry analyst firm. OpenText achieved the leading position in the FoIP segment by virtue of its 46-percent revenue growth in the past year and captured 31 percent of the market.

Read the complete press release.

For more information visit: http://faxsolutions.opentext.com/rightfax-10-whats-new.aspx or www.rightfax.com.

UPDATE January 18, 2012: Just noticed the regkey is different on Windows Server 2008. I have updated this text below.

Ugh, it happens to me every time. I am in class and its the second day. Somewhere in the middle I start talking about signatures. And the signatures I mean are the pen to paper, John Hancock style signatures that you can automatically embed in a fax attachment, using this simple <signature:sigcodehere> embedded code. Super easy, and for some of our customers, extremely useful.

Creating a signature is also super easy, as I show in class. You just find a fax with the signature you want to use. If you don’t have one already, send a new one to yourself with just the signature in just the right size. Ideally, you should have a signature that’s on its own with no lines running through. Once you have the fax with a signature then you can proceed. If however you are not the administrator, forward the outgoing fax to one of your administrators and have them follow the steps.

With the fax open, select the signature using the selection box. Thats the square with the little plus sign at the bottom. Aha! But that could be the problem, and that was why I started this article with an ugh! Its one of the annotation tools and they don’t show up if you run FaxUtil from a server OS. I seem to remember fixing this used to involve a secret handshake to get a secret reg key, but the process is now very easy. Its still a reg key, but its brain-dead easy to tweak.

Close FaxUtil and then go to HKLM\Software\RightFax Client\VWR32 (if using Windows Server 2008, go to HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\RightFax Client\VWR32 instead) and find the EnableAnnotations key. Now change the 0 to a 1 in that key and you are good to go. Next time you start FaxUtil (You did close FaxUtil, right?), then open the fax, your annotation tools should be shown. Sweet!

Now draw your little box around the signature. From the Fax menu choose Store, then Make Signature. Now enter code you want to use for a signature code, perhaps the person’s initials, and enter the usernames of the people authorised to use the signature. Now you are good to go.

Remember I told you that you had to be an administrator to do this? Well, if you aren’t, this is not going to work. If it did, then anyone could make signatures, claim them as their own, and send faxes with other people’s signatures. If that started happening who knows what would happen.

Do you use signatures in your company? Share how you use it down in the comments below. Or tell me about it on Twitter, where I go by the name technovangelist.

As you may be aware, there is a new version of RightFax coming out very soon. Its pretty exciting for us because of all the new features. But its pretty exciting for us with every release of our software. And I don’t mean just the big releases like RightFax 10. Even the Service Releases and Feature Packs are pretty exciting. Sometimes its easy to miss them, but its well worth checking out the readme that accompanies each release. I sometimes forget to read the readmes too, but they show how much we care about improving our products on a regular basis.

I was reminded of this in a recent class. In class I usually use the base product, without updating to the latest feature release. But this time we got up to date on the first day. On day two, I brought up Wireshark to demonstrate the difference between the TCP/IP and Secure TCP/IP connection types. The difference between these two options is that everything is encrypted with Secure TCP/IP, at a minimal cost in bandwidth. One of the most obvious differences between these in RightFax 9.4 base is that the password is transmitted in cleartext. If you are interested in learning more about this, see my earlier blog right here.

There are three ways to solve this issue. First, you can switch to Secure TCP/IP. Although there is an increase in bandwidth, everything is encrypted. Second, implement Integrated Security, where you associate the RightFax user with a Windows user. Then we don’t need to verify any password. The third, and probably best option, is simply to update your installation.

That’s right, we changed this behavior. And we did it very early on. Way back in Service Release 2 this was addressed. I am not sure what the date was on that but it was probably around the time of the blog where I talked about it.

So go ahead and check out the Service Releases and Feature Packs and their readme files. You can find them at http://knowledge.opentext.com. Right now as of this posting we are at RightFax 9.4 Feature Pack 1, Service Release 3. It looks like we addressed some pretty interesting issues in there and I am already looking forward to at least one of the updates in the next one too.

Of course, be sure to test these updates in your environment before you roll it out to the entire enterprise. We have done thorough testing on our side, but we don’t have the same environment as you. You might have some other application running that may cause a conflict with our updates. So just like any updates from any other manufacturer, please test them in your test environment first before a complete rollout.

Are there any recent updates, fixes, improvements that you found most useful? Share them with me in the comments below. Or contact me on Twitter where I go by the name Technovangelist.

The primary method that most of our customers use for routing incoming faxes to the intended recipient is with DID/DNIS. There we get a routing code from the phone company when the call comes in and we are able to get the fax to the right person. But what happens when the fax comes in without a good routing code? What happens when the fax comes in on a general number? Someone has to deal with it. Unless you turn on OCR routing.

OCR routing is not perfect in all cases, but it does a really good job when its really needed. Before we get into how to configure OCR routing, lets see what happens when a fax comes in for an invalid routing code. Usually, the fax ends up in the Administrator’s mailbox. Why is that? Some people assume its because the administrator is, well, the administrator. Others think its because that user was the only user on the system when it was installed. Yet others think its because the administrator’s routing code is the lowest number which is 0. Those are all good guesses, but the real reason can be found in the event viewer.

In this screenshot, I can see that the incoming fax ended up at the administrator’s mailbox because that user is the administrator of the everyone group. Thats the way it is out of the box, but there is no reason you can’t make the administrator of the Everyone group someone else. So with that fact under our belt, lets look at OCR routing.

For any user, you can set the routing type to a number of choices, including Exchange, Lotus Notes, a Network Directory, SMTP, and more. One of the choices is OCR routing. To get OCR routing you need a text file that lists out RightFax User ID’s and then the text you want to look for. Here is a short example of a routing file:

mattw matt williams
mattw matthew williams
marks mark stretch
davidm Dave McKanna
davidm David McKanna

The file is case insensitive, so the mixture of case isn’t an issue. What it says is if the OCR engine finds the text “Matt Williams” or “Matthew Williams”, route it to the RightFax user mattw. Put that somewhere on the filesystem, and then point to it in the OCR Routing configuration. Now anytime a fax comes to the OCR user, the system will OCR the coversheet looking for some text that it recognizes, and forward the fax to the appropriate user. This OCR user could be given the name: GeneralFax for the general fax number, or OCRRoute, or whatever else you like.

Now simply make this user the first administrator of the Everyone group (you can have two administrators for each group), and you have just created a catch-all address that tries its best to get the fax to the right destination.

I think this is a pretty cool feature of the product. This improved greatly in RightFax 9.4 when we implemented the RecoStar OCR engine which was part of our acquisition of OCE Document Technologies a few years ago.

Have you tried OCR routing? What do you think? I would love to hear your comments. Leave them in the comments section below. Or send me a tweet with Twitter where I go by the name technovangelist.