OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

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.

When I posted that Intro to the Fax Appliance video last week, Jaap-Jaan Pepping asked a question about the Print To Fax Driver. Basically the question was ‘why didn’t I show it’? Well, I have no good reason….I just forgot. But it’s not that I forgot to include it, I forgot to even try it. I just tried it for the first time about 10 minutes ago and guess what….it is just as easy to use as the rest of this appliance.

The first step is to go to the Preferences section of the client. On that dialog there is a button to download the print to fax client. When you open the file you downloaded, it will open one dialog asking you for information about how to connect to the system.

I entered my name and password. A few seconds later, the install was complete and the little icon in the status try told me it connected.

So now I was ready to go. I opened up Microsoft Word and wrote up a little test document to send. From the standard print dialog, I chose the Fax Printer. If you have Rightfax installed as well, you want the Fax Printer, not the RightFax Fax Printer. But the company who is buying the Fax Appliance probably hasn’t also bought RightFax…I think. Anyway, when you choose that printer and click Print, you get this dialog. (It came up surprisingly quick!)

This is pretty much the same dialog you see inside the actual Fax Appliance client. I can add my recipient’s name and fax number. I can even choose to add this recipient to my Contacts, which is pretty cool.

If I want to, I can add other contacts which are already in my Contacts collection.

The next step is to choose any other documents I want to add, beyond the one that I just printed.

I can choose a coversheet and fill in the coversheet notes. By the way, the coversheet you see is not one of the standard coversheets, but a custom coversheet I created in just a few minutes. Maybe a future video or blog will cover coversheet creation with the Fax Appliance…let me know in the comments if you want one of those.

I can fill in some other information here and then click send. You might have noticed that all the other dialogs had the send button as well, so I could have skipped the last few dialogs and just sent the fax quickly.

When I am done, the Print-to-Fax icon shows me that the fax was submitted successfully to the system for sending.

And thats it. It took longer to write up the blog post than it did to figure out how to Print to Fax with the Fax Appliance. It probably took you longer to read this than to just do it. It really is easy!!!

I hope this post is useful for you and if you have any comments, leave them in the comment section below. If you have been reading this blog recently, you’ll see that almost every comment gets turned into a detailed answer via either a blog entry or a longer video, so I hope you’ll see that we seriously take notice of the comments here. If you don’t want to comment here, you can also share your thoughts with me on Twitter, where I can be reached at technovangelist.

When I posted the latest video about the Open Text Fax Appliance A102 and A104 last week, one of the comments came from Wendy who asked about the reporting thats built in to the device. There is a brief shot of the reports in that video, but I though I would delve into it just a bit further here. First off, here is her question:

Can you please let me know what the reporting functionality is. Can a report be run daily, weekly, quarterly as to how many faxes have been received or sent down to the detail of reporting on how many faxes to or from specific numbers?

Yes, yes, yes, yes,….and yes. I think I covered it all in that sentence. The reporting in the Fax Appliance is very easy to use and provides just the right information that the target customer would need. The report is available to any administrator of the appliance and is under the tab marked Reports. When you run a report, it defaults to showing you everything. All faxes sent and received. Here is a screenshot of that report:

Here I can see that 29 faxes have been sent and received. I can see who was the owner on the appliance, what was the name on the TTI line for received faxes, when was it sent or received, how many pages, and more. I could have changed the Start and End Dates to whatever time period I care about: today’s faxes, this week’s, quarter’s, or year’s faxes.

If I want to narrow it down further, I can ask it to show me all faxes to and from the NYC area code by typing 1212 in the Contains field and clicking Generate:

Alternatively I can change that Contains field to show a user name on the system:

Actually, any text that shows up in the report can be typed into the Contains field and we will filter down the results to show just that information.

I hope that clears up the reporting capability built into this great little appliance. If you have any further questions, leave them for me here in the comments below. Or contact me on Twitter where I go by the name technovangelist.

The Fax Appliance A102 and A104 are so incredibly easy to setup and configure as I have demonstrated in this brand new video available now on our YouTube channel:

I was able to go from the shipping box to faxing in less than 5 minutes. And that includes configuring a few users, letting other users create themselves as needed, setting in-bound routing, integrating MFP’s and printers, and more. Add a few more minutes to create a custom cover sheet. It’s really cool and this video shows some of that along with what its like to send and receive faxes from the brand new Fax Appliance. Check it out.

If you have other ideas for future videos, share them with me here in the comments. Or contact me on twitter where I go by the name technovangelist.

EDIT: Somehow I managed to forget to include information on the notifications that you get from the Appliance when you receive a fax. Thanks to JJ in the comments below for pointing it out to me. Look to this article right here on the FaxSolutions Blog for an example of one of those emails.

My Dearest Valentine,

We’ve been together for nearly 25 years.

I can trust you with all my secrets.

You are reliable and trustworthy, everything I’ve ever dreamed of.

You reduce costs, streamline business processes and improve productivity.

You have extensive tracking, auditing and reporting components.

You integrate with SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and many others.

No one can compare.

It’s no wonder people love you.

You leverage Ricoh, Xerox, Konica Minolta, HP and every other MFD/MFP.

You have a hosted service that is rich, scalable and fully integrated.

Your secure document delivery solution enables certified document exchange between two parties for most file types.

Call centers, mortgage processors, law firms, financial institutions and healthcare organizations love you.

We at OpenText love you.

Companies around the world love you.

You are RightFax, the world’s leading fax server and the fastest growing Internet Fax solution.

–Share your RightFax Valentine poem. We’d love to hear from you.–

If you’re a college football fan you probably know Feb 2^nd is “signing day” when the top high school players commit to big time college football programs. How do these high school football players confirm their choice? With a letter of intent — via fax. Big time college football programs are not willing to wait for signed letters to arrive in the mail, so fax transmissions become top priority on this day.

How important are these faxes to college football programs and fans? According to this article on the Wall Street Journal online the University of Washington set up a Web cam pointing at the fax machine on signing day last year so fans could catch some “can’t-miss football action.” According to the article the Web cam feed was so popular many potential viewers couldn’t get on.

Why would all of these big time college programs, with deep pockets and vast resources, use an older technology like fax? Why not just have these signed letters sent in via email? Two main reasons are that (1) email is too easy to forward or intercept and (2) both sides want confirmation of delivery — which is something email can’t reliably provide.

Using fax to sign high profile athletes isn’t limited to NCAA football. What happens when a top prospective player on your European soccer team can’t get a fax through? Ask the FC Köln football (soccer) club. Just yesterday a top player from Hamburger SV had his transfer deal to FC Köln negated after the fax confirming the transaction arrived late to the German Football League.

Now, back to Brett Favre. How did he let the NFL know he wasn’t (really) retiring in 2008? Via Fax. According to this NY Times article “Favre formally applied for reinstatement to the N.F.L. on Tuesday, faxing a letter to the league office — the first step in a process that could have Favre back wearing his No. 4 Packers jersey, or perhaps in the uniform of another team, later this week. “

Fax continues to play an integral role in our ever day lives – even superstars send faxes one page at a time. If your sports teams have RightFax they probably know the score…

By Jim Weiser

With the launch of the new OpenText Fax Appliance A102 and A104, we have developed a very cost-effective fax solution. As we’ve just wrapped up our extensive beta program period, consisting of end customers and Value Added Resellers in the US, Canada, Europe, China, and the Middle East, I’ve been in the process of interviewing and gathering the participant’s thoughts on the appliance. One comment which continues to be raised throughout the sites and surveys is the sheer affordability of the appliance, especially when compared to a subscription fax solution. A subscription fax solution, we know, has per page and/or per user costs, which can increase significantly over time, something that our Fax Appliance avoids.

One customer involved in the beta program particularly stands out in my mind. He stated that they had 20 users for their subscription fax solution. Each department was then forced to absorb the cost of the service by having those 20 employees submit expense reports each month. The Managing Director was unaware that his organization was spending, on average, $600 per month on faxing for only about 100 pages per day! This customer, like many, didn’t realize how quickly the per page and per user costs were adding up over time. They have since implemented a Fax Appliance A104 and believe that they have cut their fax spending by at least half. The customer has calculated that the A104 will pay for itself in less than 9 months.

Like above, by switching to the OpenText Fax Appliance, customers will still be able to receive the same low maintenance benefits as a service—without the hidden fees racking up. Most see a return on their investment in as little as 2 months; now that’s a significant savings.

In addition to creating a cost-effective product, we’ve also created one that is remarkably easy to use. Simplicity is the game and reviews from our beta sites have returned, without exception, comments on just how easy the A102 and A104 products are to deploy, maintain and use. Our 35 page Admin Guide is enough, circumventing a need for a User Guide altogether.

Uncomplicated and cost-effective, it really doesn’t get any better than that.

By Jim Wieser, Senior Product Manager

Today we have announced Open Text Fax Appliance A10x, a new family of Fax Appliances designed to simplify network fax deployment and use, while providing a cost effective alternative to traditional MFP fax kits and recurring monthly charges with internet fax service providers.

Designed as a simple to deploy, maintain, and use network appliance, the new OpenText Fax Appliance addresses the needs of small businesses and departments with limited IT resources and basic faxing requirements. OpenText is the only vendor offering a complete range of fax solutions including appliances, servers, and fax gateways.

The new Fax Appliance A10x is a true network appliance. The Fax Appliance provides simplified installation and setup and incorporates all the features and capabilities you need in an affordable turnkey fax solution. Users can easily send and receive faxes from the desktop, multi-function products (MFPs), and email.

Integration of Fax Appliance with multi-function products (MFPs) allows organizations to consolidate network faxing services. MFP integration is included in all Fax Appliance models, allowing users to easily fax paper documents using an MFP or network scanner equipped with scan-to-email functionality.

Our goal from the start has been to develop a product for the global market. To that end, we support 14 languages in both user and administrator modes. Even the system audit trail is translated into 14 languages.

Click to read the complete announcement.

For more information, visit the Fax Appliance website at www.fax-appliance.com

To contact sales, please email captaris.sales@opentext.com or call 1-800-304-2727

A few months ago, I created a video that showed how easy it was to configure the new Open Text Fax Gateway 308. Along with the video, I created a blog entry right here on this weblog. One of the questions I got regarding that video was how did it apply to the Fax Gateway 2100 series? After all, those are far more capable gateways. Are they just as easy to configure?

Yes, they are. And I have the video to prove it. Visit the FDDG YouTube channel to see my latest video which shows you everything you need to do to get a 2100 gateway up and running (or just watch it below). And it was done in roughly the same amount of time as for the 308. It really is incredibly easy to configure. Just like the 308, it’s a matter of assigning phone numbers and defining the routing from the IP interface to the E1 port and back.

Actually, it’s a little more complex than that since you will have to configure it to use the same type of E1, T1, or J1 trunk, but the required information should be provided by your phone company. Choosing the right settings is a simple matter of selecting it from the drop down. You can be up and running in just a few minutes.

So check out the video and let us know what you think, either here in the comments, or in the comments on the YouTube website. Also let us know if you have suggestions for another video like this. I have a few in my pipeline, but its always more interesting to work off of your requests. Again, you can leave those suggestions in the places just mentioned, or you could also contact me on Twitter, where I go by the name technovangelist.

In my previous blog entry we looked at a very simple Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Trunking implementation. In today’s example we will explore a more complex example.

Another customer of ours was looking for a fax solution that would handle the following:

• Allow customers to send faxes to them via a toll free number to a central location
• Redistribute the received faxes to remote locations via their wide area network
• Maintain a redundant site that would be able to send and receive faxes if the main site was down
• Allow the remote sites to send faxes to the main site to be redistributed as necessary

As they began looking at a viable architecture to handle their needs they first looked at deploying a standard telephony based solution. It became immediately clear that this solution would be very expensive and not very flexible. The costs to maintain phone lines as well as to put remote board servers at each of the locations prompted them to explore other options. Based upon their research a SIP Trunk would meet all of their needs at a fraction of the cost.

A SIP trunk would:

• Provide a toll free number into their main location as well as a second redundant location
• Provide service to all of their remote locations
• Terminate all internal fax calls to either the main or redundant location

The only issue was that while the provider could support all of their needs at a reduced cost the SIP Trunk did not support T.38 for faxing. A simplified illustration of the topology is below.

Click to enlarge image.

Because the provider did not offer T.38 it became necessary to utilize a third party gateway as a session border controller to enable T.38 capabilities from the G.711 and G.729 codecs that were being provided.

With the gateway in place, when a fax was sent to an 800 number or to internal numbers associated to the SIP trunk the gateway would:

• Provide T.38 capabilities
• Transcode the G.729 codec to G.711 if necessary
• Pass the call to the SR-140 software on the Open Text Fax Server

Note: Transcoding is a method used by devices to translate one codec type to another. Information received by the gateway from the SIP trunk utilizing a G.729 codec has to be translated into G.711 because the SR-140 software used by the Fax Server must be G.711.

Once received the fax would be routed to the proper user and could be accessed by clients remotely via the WAN connection.

As an organization we expect to see more and more installations that include SIP Trunking. Because SIP Trunking is a fairly new offering there can be issues that arise when utilizing the technology. Purchasing a trunk that supports T.38 will make a FoIP installation much easier. Trunks that do not offer T.38 can still be utilized with faxing but may require additional hardware as outlined in our example.

To learn more about SIP and all aspects associated with Fax over IP we recommend our FoIP Fundamentals online course. For more information on this class or any of the classes offered by the training group please visit our Learning Services Web page.