OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

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!

Question #8: Where can I find good FoIP technical resources?

One of the most respected names and leading authorities on FoIP is Cisco’s David Hanes. These links provide neutral information on FoIP:

• Implementing Fax over IP
• The Emergence of T.38 as the De Fact Standard for FoIP
• Facebook Forum Summary – Fax Over IP (FoIP) Basics, Design and Best Practices 

Question #9: Who is the Market Leader in FoIP?

We don’t mean to toot our own horn, but OpenText is the world leader of FoIP as well as traditional fax servers (source: Davidson Consulting).   Frost and Sullivan, in their November 2010 Enterprise Fax Market Report, announced that OpenText is the fax server market share leader by almost double its nearest competitor.

OpenText RightFax has been successfully deployed across multiple IP networks and SIP trunks. RightFax 10 (released in June of 2011), has many feature enhancements which will assist you with your FoIP deployments. RightFax is also much more than fax. Embedded as part of RightFax is a secure document delivery solution called SecureDocs that allows you to send and track almost any file type securely.

Question #9 and 1/2: Where can I go to discuss FoIP with the experts?

Don’t miss your chance to hear from two of the industry’s leading experts on FoIP: David Hanes; Gonzalo Salgueiro from Cisco – two guys who literally wrote the book on FoIP. Join David and Gonzalo on November 10^th for an educational webinar that will Explore the Roadmap of SIP Trunking for FoIP. You can also view a recording of a recent joint webinar by OpenText and Dialogic Take the Mystery out of SIP Trunking.

Matthew Brine, General Manager
Fax and Document Distribution Group
OpenText Corporation

Joshua Butcher, Senior Technical Instructor
Fax and Document Distribution Group
OpenText Corporation

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 #2: What is the best protocol to use for FoIP?

T.38 is the ITU recommendation for Group 3 (G3) fax transmission between terminals where, in addition to the PSTN, a portion of the transmission path used between G3 facsimile terminals includes an IP network. T.38 has become the accepted standard for FoIP communications, in part because of its multi-level redundancy mechanism to maintain fax integrity as well as its low bandwidth requirements.

Question #3: Who is the leader in T.38 innovations?

The global leader in T.38 technology is Dialogic. What differentiates Dialogic from every other T.38 vendor is their documented interoperability list and the testing that they do to ensure that their technology works across the many different fax machines and gateways in the market today. Dialogic’s FoIP solutions also offer G.711 pass-through as an option to ensure that compatibility with legacy media gateways is still possible.

Important: When choosing a FoIP solution, always ask to see the public interoperability lists and compatibility information supported by the vendor.

Stay tuned for part 3, Wednesday, November 2.

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.

If you’ve ever wondered how to:

• Manage individual delegates via one tool
• Import and export delegate settings
• Run reporting on delegates

I’ve got good news for you.  Delegates Manager is a fax solution offering that allows administrators to handle all three of these tasks.  Today’s blog will focus on just how to make the most of this solution.

Managing individual delegates…

One of the first ways you can use the Delegates Manager is to manage individual delegates.  After logging into the tool as administrator you select a tab called “Management”.

Next, you select a user you want to manage.  At this point you will be able to see which RightFax users have access to the user you selected. 

This is also where you can add a new delegate as well as choose what permissions they have by selecting the check boxes and click the appropriate button to apply the settings.  And of course, if necessary, you can also delete a delegate from here.

Import and export delegates…

If you select the “Import/Export” tab and you can:

• Export delegates from a server
• Import delegates from a server
• Export delegates from a server and periodically restore settings to overwrite user updates

Exporting is pretty easy and can be completed by selecting a combination of groups and users and then clicking “Start Export”.  Sensitive information?  No problem; you can encrypt the file for security purposes.  And the file being exported is in XML format which allows third-party applications to create XML export files.

Once you are done exporting you can logout of the current RightFax server, log in to a new RightFax server and import the delegates settings.   This keeps the delegates settings the same between RightFax servers and allows it to function as a master server with properly setup delegates permissions.

Word of caution: the Delegates Manager will only import the settings of users that it can find on the destination server based on their user name.  It will then update existing delegates permissions to match the exported settings so that they are identical.  Information on conflicts with missing users between the export and import systems are displayed on the screen and extensive logging is placed in the event log.

Reporting on delegates…

Lastly, we have a module that allows for reporting on delegates.  These reports can then be exported in a variety of formats.  This is also the only feature discussed today that can be run as a non-administrator.  As an administrator, however,  you can report on delegates for the entire RightFax server whereas a non-administrator can only report on the delegates for the RightFax group they are a member of.

Much like the “Import/Export” tab, you select the users and groups you want to report on.

When you select “Generate Report” it will display a generated report on the screen that you can then print or export in to your chosen format; including PDF, excel, and XPS.

To recap, Delegates Manager can:

• Manage individual delegates
• Import and export delegate settings
• Run reporting on delegates

What’s next?  Part two will dive into specific use cases for the Delegates Manager.

The fact sheet for the Delegates Manager can be found below:

 https://knowledge.opentext.com/knowledge/llisapi.dll/Open/19032063

Please note, the Delegates Manager is a licensed solution and evaluation copies are available.

To request a copy of the Delegates Manager, an evaluation license or to learn more about Professional Services, please contact captaris.sales@opentext.com.

As a fax-nerd, I am pretty excited about our September 22nd webinar: Take the Mystery out of SIP Trunking. From a fax perspective and at its most basic definition, SIP trunking simply means to send a fax from one IP device to another without having to go through the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

This is where the Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSP) comes to the rescue. Ultimately, there are two important “take-aways” from this upcoming session that I think are worth noting:

First, make sure you are using a Session Border Controller.

You have two methods of working with SIP Trunking: a) piggy-back on your existing internet connection and risking the performance and security issues that come with that or b) get a Session Border Controller (SBC) which will be used to manage the connection between your site and the ITSP. The choice of using a SBC should seem obvious if you are in the enterprise fax world.

Second, know your FoIP protocol choices.

In the world of Fax over IP (FoIP), there are really only two options to consider: T.38 Fax Relay (where the IP gateway agrees to “relay” the fax tones sent to/from the fax server) or Fax Pass-through (where the IP Gateway simply “passes” the fax tone samples sent to/from the fax server).  This makes T.38 Fax Relay the better choice as you do not have to encapsulate every little fax squeak and noise and then over the network between the OpenText RightFax server and the ITSP.  It is the fax tone samples that are the most sensitive to network problems and if lost or out of sync, you are most likely going to get some fax transmission errors. This means if you are using Fax Pass-through instead of T.38 Fax Relay, you may have some issues with SIP Trunking (in particular if you do not use a SBC).

If you are interested in learning more, I encourage you to register for Take the Mystery Out of SIP Trunking on September 22 at 10AM PDT. 

If you have any experiences with SIP trunk faxing, I would love to hear them. You can tweet me @JoshuaTeaches or via email at jbutcher@opentext.com

Image provided by amanderson2

By

Chris Myers, OpenText Regional Sales Director- Eastern Region

During my tenure at OpenText we have had a variety of ways to fax enable branch office settings.  Recently, I have seen customers really start to understand the concept that RightFax can help address fax costs across a wide variety of branch office settings.  Given the multiple ways RightFax and supporting technology can be deployed, it is no wonder that one of these options resonates with so many customers. 

The first scenario I see gaining traction is fax enabling an MFP at the branch office by adding the MFP Connector to the MFP device.  This allows the MFP to communicate with a centralized RightFax server.  This is a low cost, moderately-high functionality configuration.  One thing to be aware of is how the “print” jobs transferred over the network from the branch office MFP to a centralized RightFax server will affect bandwidth between sites. 

The second scenario getting attention, when traffic warrants it, is leveraging an existing branch office IP infrastructure and its data connection and converting the inbound faxes to t.38 packets and transferring those packets to a centralized RightFax server typically housed in the data center.  This scenario is more acceptable when the branch office has IT staff to maintain the gateway and the branch fax volume justifies the investment.  This configuration has minimal impact on the bandwidth requirement as the gateway converts the images to t.38 upon receipt. 

Another scenario, receiving a very receptive response from customers and prospects, is the idea of installing RightFax Branch Office Server.  The RightFax Branch Office Server gives a branch office its own scaled down RightFax server that works in conjunction with a larger, centralized RightFax server at HQ.  This is the preferred, and recommended, configuration for organizations that have branch offices with larger fax volumes and the IT staff to support this architecture. 

Having multiple options allows our channel partners to help customers and prospects maximize their usage of software to comply with the many technical and business requirements faced by organizations today.  For questions and additional information, email captaris.sales@opentext.com.

At the 2011 Open Text Global Fax Summit, I sat in on the Introduction to Hosted Fax Services and Leveraging Fax Technology thought Google, Microsoft, SAP, and FileNET session. The session, as you can see by the name, covered several topics but the focus was really on two new offerings now available with RightFax.

The Hosted services is a cloud based fax offering that allows customer to have a fax environment without having to dedicate the resources and rack space to manage it. Why is the Open Text hosted services model better than other solutions? Well, this is not your store-and-forward-mass-fax offerings where faxes from all clients sit on a common server to be sent out. With the Open Text model each customer has their own dedicated RightFax server environment that can operate as an on-premise RightFax server.  This means you can connect MFPs, Exchange, Various Integrations, and RightFax Clients and allows the Hosted customers a feature-rich private fax environment that is robust, secure, and has virtually no system maintenance. It is also offered in two flavors. You can move your current RightFax environment to the hosted solution or, if you are a new customer, you can “rent” the software in the hosted environment. The Hosted offering also has three service levels from Standard, Enterprise, to Premium with increasing SLAs for each. This offers another great benefit in having a solution that has a very high SLA for those customers where fax is considered mission critical.

The second offering the session covered was a new feature available in RightFax 10 that allows users of Microsoft Office365 and Google Apps to integrate with fax. For those of you that don’t know what Office365 and Google Apps are, they are cloud based office suites that include mail and applications for creating documents, spreadsheets, etc. So how does that work? RightFax 10 now offers a secure connection using SMTP/POP3 with SSL that allows both suites to connect to the RightFax server just as if everything was on-premise.

Why is this important? Because Microsoft is committing quite a bit of resources to grow the Office365 subscription service and Google now has 30 million clients or 3 million businesses subscribed,  there are quite a number of people that can now take advantage of this new feature. Also since they are RightFax then can maintain their company faxes for compliancy where needed.

I found the session very informative about both solutions as the speakers went into great detail on each subject. The hosted offering offers a new way for customers to manage, increase their SLA, or get started with a fax server environment. With Open Text’s eleven years of hosting enterprise applications you can defiantly sleep well at night knowing that the experts will be managing your fax environment.  Also, the many users of Office365 and Google Apps now have the industry leading  enterprise fax server at their finger tips with the new integration abilities of RightFax 10.

Hopefully you may be able to use one of these technologies in your business to help expand, manage, or start a new fax server environment. If any of you have had experience with these new offerings please post and let everyone know how it worked for you.

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