OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

Question #6: What are fax gateways used for?

You can leverage all the benefits and cost advantages of FoIP without a VoIP infrastructure with a fax gateway. A fax gateway allows for scalability and flexibility of the current state by giving an organization the control of integrating or not, into current or future network infrastructure. This may be relevant if you are planning on upgrading your existing fax server or purchasing a fax server and our planning a VoIP implementation in the future. For more information about the value of leveraging a fax gateway see the whitepapers and datasheets at http://faxsolutions.opentext.com/fax-gateway-for-foip.aspx.

Question #7: What is SIP Trunking?

Many companies have started using or are considering a SIP trunk to connect their PBX to the global telephone system infrastructure (PSTN) via the Internet. Unfortunately, not all SIP trunk providers support faxing through their SIP trunks even though many claim they do. Before making a decision to go to a SIP trunk, you will want to be sure to determine exactly which FoIP protocol is supported so that you can decide whether the solution is best for your fax traffic demands. Theblogs  below will provide more information on SIP trunking and its impact on faxing:

• SIP Trunking: Part 1 – Introduction to SIP Trunking
• SIP Trunking: Part 2 – Faxing and SIP Trunking  
• SIP Trunking: Part 3 – Faxing and SIP Trunking, a more complex scenario discussion

The final installment will be posted Wednesday, November 9th. 

Question #4: Are all FoIP Methods Acceptable to use?

Many fax service providers use SMTP (T.37 store-and-forward) as the transport layer for sending and receiving faxes from the fax service to the fax service user.T.37 faxing, even though it is over the Internet, is not the best choice for fax traffic that demand real-time response. According to the technology analyst group Gartner, a fax service may not be suitable if fax traffic is mission critical, time sensitive or contains confidential material due to issues associated with SMTP and service provider security.

Question #5: Can FoIP actually reduce costs?

Choosing a FoIP implementation versus a traditional TDM fax server implementation can reduce costs (including lower energy usage), improve IT efficiency and reduce downtime by consolidating PSTN resources as well as being able to be implemented in virtualized environments. Learn more about the many benefits of FoIP by reading this FoIP whitepaper or visiting http://faxsolutions.opentext.com/fax-over-ip.aspx.

 Part 4 to come on Monday, November 7th.

Earlier this year, Matthew Brine wrote an article for Telecom Reseller  that spoke to how fax continues to be an integral part of business today.  The essence of the article was to debunk the myth that fax is obsolescent technology and explain how fax has evolved to assist many companies to reduce their costs, streamline (automate) business processes and improve employee productivity.

A key component driving the evolution of fax technology is fax over IP (FoIP) or IP faxing as it is sometimes called.  Although the concept of FoIP is not new, it can be difficult to find a simple and consistent explanation of FoIP, thus causing confusion and questions.   Some of this confusion is caused by suppliers of FoIP technology in an effort to promote their own products. Consequently, I thought it would be good to provide some information about FoIP and share some resources to help you make the best decision for your company and your fax needs.

Here are 9 ½ questions and answers that will help you gain insight into FoIP:

Question #1: What exactly is FoIP?

FoIP is simply a means of sending and receiving faxes over an IP network. There are basically three different kinds of FoIP protocols that can be used: G.711 pass-through, T.37 store-and-forward and T.38 fax relay.

• G.711 pass-through works just like a voice over IP (VoIP) call where every component of the fax communication is sent in the form of voice packets. If you lose some of those voice packets, the fax can easily be distorted resulting in failed transmissions. Since the traffic is all voice packets, bandwidth demands can be pretty high.

• T.37 store-and-forward works more like an e-mail where the fax content is sent to a mail server to be processed. Unlike the other FoIP protocols this is not real-time, meaning that there is no way for the sender to know whether the fax is actually being received at the same time you are sending it.

• T.38 fax relay only sends just enough voice packets (i.e., tones) for a media gateway to determine whether the call is a fax or not. The rest of the fax tones are then “relayed” from the gateway and not the fax server itself.

Stay tuned for the next post on Monday, October 31st.

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.

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.

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 sometimes comes up in my RightFax classes is in regards to figuring out which faxes are in the images directory. There are a lot of related questions. “I have a fax in FaxUtil, where is the image file?” or “I have an image file, which fax does it correspond to?” or “who are most of these faxes for?” or “when did these faxes come in?”. There are probably a lot more questions that could be asked about the same topic.

So my question is how do you come up with that answer? In the coming days, I’ll post a few of the answers that I know about, but I hope you come up with a few I hadn’t thought of. All of my answers will only use software included on the installation media, but if you have a custom app you have built, tell us about it here.

Here is my first answer, but don’t let that stop you from posting your own answers.

1. Answer #1: A Built-in Keyboard Shortcut
2. Answer #2: From the Command Line

Just before the Global Fax Summit, I drove over to Amstelveen in the Netherlands where I live to visit with HP at their offices. My purpose was to collect footage of a person using an HP MFP to send a fax. What with GFS, getting sick, and other projects, I only just recently had a chance to edit it down to a nice video. So here it is.

What you’ll see in this video is a simple scenario of walking up to the MFP, scanning in a document, and pressing send. Regardless of whether I have a single MFP or hundreds, configuration in RightFax is incredibly simple and the EDC Monitor allows the admin to watch the entire process of sending the fax.

When the user walks up to the MFP, they can be logged in automatically as a generic “WALKUP” user, enter in their credentials using the number pad or touchscreen, or use the SafeCom system which requires them to simply swipe their access card. SafeCom makes the process of sending a fax even easier than before. Its pretty cool.

Watch the video and let me know what you think of it here in the comments.

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.

Did you ever wonder what happens when your fax goes to the other side? When a fax is sent from RightFax (or any other fax device), you have no idea what the other side is. Hopefully its RightFax, but it could be just a standard fax machine. And when that’s the case, your fax is sitting on a pile with dozens of other faxes. Anyone who walks by the fax machine can flip through your fax. To avoid this situation we offer SecureDocs (sometimes referred to as Certified Delivery). SecureDocs is great because your confidential document doesn’t sit on the pile with all the other faxes. Instead, the intended recipient downloads the document only when they are ready to read it; no one else ever has a chance to view it. But if you have to send a traditional fax there is something you can do to mark the fax as confidential.

The solution is…ready for it? Forms. Forms are kind of like watermarks on a sheet of paper or on a lot of international paper money. Looking at the stacks of foreign notes at the home office I see watermarks of Bartolome Mitre on the Argentinian Dos Pesos note, what I assume is a falcon on the UAE 20 Dirhams note, and someone important on the Nepali Five Rupees note. But unlike these watermarks, you don’t have to hold the fax up to the light to see the form.

A RightFax is simply a page taken from any other fax which you want superimposed on every page of another fax. Now this won’t make any sense if you use a source page that is filled with text because then you won’t be able to read anything on the new fax. What makes more sense is to use a simple word or a very simple, 2 tone image. Here is a screen shot of the two forms that are included in the default install of RightFax:

Creating a form is incredibly easy. The steps I like to follow is to create the image, then fax it to yourself with no coversheet, then open the sent fax (not the received version since that will be slightly lower quality), and save it as a form. Next time you send a fax, your new form will be available for you to use. Rather than listing out all the steps in detail, I have created a video you can watch to get all the details.

Do you use forms? Did this video help? Let me know by leaving a comment below. Or contact me on twitter where I go by the name technovangelist.