OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

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.

By Matthew McWhirter with Axient, an OpenText Partner

The Transport Booking and Invoicing Transformation (also known as Transport Booking, or TBIT) project is the first of a number of projects which fall under the Choice and Maintainability Services program for the Federal Government Department.

The Transport Booking project will deliver a number of business and technical outcomes by replacing an outdated and unsustainable technical booking system. It will also ensure a consistent quality of service delivery as it is driven by nationally consistent business process implementation. With a number of centralized customer service centers supporting the Department’s regional, state, and national operations, fax is a widely used communication channel.

The project will be delivered in two parts – an initial pilot rollout to a selected location in January 2011, as well as a national rollout which will follow the initial pilot. There is a strategic imperative to demonstrate the ability to embed the necessary change management, governance culture, project and program management capabilities using this project; as well as ensuring the Department’s continued efficiency and discipline in maintenance of operations and service delivery in an environment of significant ICT-enabled change. This particular project was chosen because it offers large potential benefits in terms of process efficiency and IT support risk reduction.

So where does Fax fit in? Fax is a required and commonly used service delivery channel. Using the XML and Integration modules, a web-based fax interface is being deployed. Functionality used in these modules includes XML Submit, Action and Query. This will allow the Department to submit faxes from within their IIS application and give them the capability to monitor the fax through their own business process. It will also allow them to deliver real time updates to the web within Book Car With Driver service.

The OpenText RightFax solution, implemented early last year, is a dual server V9.4, SR140 Collective integrated with Avaya.

For additional information or to learn more about Axient, please contact Matthew McWhirter, mmcwhirter[at]axient.com.au or visit www.axient.com.au.

I recently read Wikipedia’s entry on production fax and drew two conclusions: (1) Wikipedia is wrong, sort of, and (2) I must be a word geek for wanting to point that out.

Wikipedia says that production fax is “the process of integrating an electronic fax software application to automate the sending and receiving of fax documents.” That was true some year back, but these days production fax describes outbound technology that allows business to integrate, automate and deliver documents.

Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition, can receive tremendous volumes of faxes, route them, categorize them, insert them into workflows, email them, etc.—all automatically. That’s not generally called production fax anymore, it’s called fax automation. Of course, it doesn’t really matter what you call it … unless you’re a word geek like me, in which case it’s fascinating.

Feel free to make up your own name for it. Like productivity fax, or Oracle-SAP-and-almost-any-system-fax. Okay, that last one was too long. What really matters is how you can leverage it to make your business more profitable, which is explained in about 500 words in this short (3:30) video.

This video is also available for Partners to download as .wmv from Solutions Central. Use this unaltered version on your own website, Youtube channel, or anywhere else you’d like to share this information.

By Mark Howarth with Axient, an Open Text Partner based in Australia

We recently worked with an Australian-based international law firm, upgrading their enterprise fax environment to reduce IT infrastructure and operating costs by 46% based on previous financial year costs.

Initially, the law firm’s management thought that fax was dead and not widely used within the company. The law firm engaged with our team at Axient to implement a business analysis project to understand volume and usage of fax by line of business. To their surprise, fax was far from dead and remains an integral part of the overall business. Included in our analysis was the cost reduction and efficiency gain from a multi-function printer integration. To meet IT objectives of cost savings and simplicity, Axient implemented a solution that consolidated the existing environment of four physical, aged servers to one RightFax v9.4 Enterprise Suite virtual server, and SR140 Fax over IP with media gateways for PSTN connectivity.

The solution from Axient met the firms goals and provided them with a robust and reliable enterprise fax platform. In addition, the project is generating ROI in less than 6 months.

For more information about Axient, please feel free to contact me at mhowarth[at]axient.com.au or visit our website at http://www.axient.com.au/.

Doreen Eatough, Director, Marketing

Today we have announced that Open Text has achieved Preferred Solutions Developer Partner status with Cisco. This is the highest level of partnership within the Cisco Developer Network. Our commitment to and investment in innovative technology and industry-leading fax and secure document deliver solutions has earned us this honor and I am delighted to share this great news with you.

In conjunction with our elevated partner status, we have also successfully completed interoperability testing and certification of Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition with Cisco Unified Communications Manager 8.0X and CISCO Unity Connection 8. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/products/sw/voicesw/ps556/index.html

Open Text Fax Server has long been a trusted Cisco fax solution, supporting Cisco clients in their Unified Messaging and Unified Communication requirements, including business continuity, virtualization and back-office application integrations.

To further enhance Cisco fax client needs, we are also introducing an Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Branch Office solution for Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) Express. This combined offering addresses the requirements for an organization’s branch offices to operate independently, reduce costs and footprint while at the same time adhering to security and compliance requirements set by headquarters. Watch the video.

For additional information please visit our Website or click on any of the following links.

By John Harrison, Senior Director, Business Development

Today we have announced our newest offering, Open Text Hosted Fax Services, which I am thrilled to be able to share with you. Open Text Hosted Fax Services enables organizations to simplify and meet business objectives with a rich, scalable, and fully integrated hosted Fax Server system managed by the experts at Open Text.

Open Text Hosted Fax Services extends the scope of our current Fax Server, RightFax Edition and includes a comprehensive enterprise-class service where Open Text hosts, manages and administers dedicated Fax Server environments on behalf of each of our customers.

No longer do enterprise organizations need to sacrifice flexibility, user experience or data security when outsourcing the management of their fax infrastructure. With dedicated servers for each of our customers, our new offering allows customers to take advantage of our industry leading Open Text Fax Server, Right Fax Edition. Our Hosted Fax Services enable customers to lower their total cost of ownership while maintaining the utmost levels of security and confidentiality for their mission critical data, without all of the upfront costs and maintenance.

Our goal from the start has been to develop an integrated product offering that provides the reliability, security, flexibility and trust that our enterprise customers have come to expect from Open Text. Enterprises across industries, including healthcare, financial services and government, will find our Hosted Fax Services to rapidly scale to any size while providing a fully integrated solution equivalent to traditional premises-based Fax Server systems.

Click here to read the complete announcement.

For more information, visit our website at http://faxsolutions.opentext.com/hosted-fax-services.aspx.

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

By Jonathan Sze
Director, North American Solutions

A few months ago I was approached by our Global Services team to implement an integrated fax solution for our customer, Dynegy. Dynegy had been implementing their trade confirmation process using Endur® from OpenLink®, the back-office solution used in the various commodity markets for trading, risk management and operations needs.

For years, Dynegy had entrusted Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition as part of their production trade confirmation infrastructure. RightFax ensures secure and automated fax delivery of the trade confirmations to their counterparties. Hundreds of business critical faxes were sent per day for this process alone.

As part of Dynegy’s Open Text ECM Suite rollout, Dynegy recognized a key opportunity to integrate their enterprise content management system with Fax Server: a single, tightly integrated solution will provide dramatic improvements in efficiency and new levels of productivity with their trade confirmation process..

The Solution
As with most enterprise system integration engagements, the key to delivering a successful solution is dependent on both coming up with a robust and scalable design; and an in-depth understanding of our customer’s needs, constraints, business processes and workflows. We had a number of productive scope calls with the Dynegy; and reassured our customer we can easily reduce or even eliminate some of their inefficient manual processes.

We quickly determined our Content Server FaxConnector is indeed the perfect solution for Dynegy. The prepackaged components enable Dynegy to send PDFs along with key metadata, originating from their Endur® system, directly onward to Fax Server. This eliminates the manual entry of recipient information such as fax numbers and “to be faxed” status, along with over fifty different metadata fields. The extensible design of the integration service also allows Dynegy to customize frequency of scan and fax delivery.

Most importantly, the FaxConnector logs and reports all send-fax status back to Content Server for archival – success and failure states, and status timestamps. Understanding exactly what happened with fax transmission is critical for Dynegy – and for most enterprise customers as well – because fax confirmation creates an official record of their business transaction.

The Design
From an architecture standpoint, the Content Server FaxConnector consists of three key components. On the Content Server side, the FaxConnector Module and Sending and Status Services which interface with Enterprise Web Services. Installed on the fax server are a set of Windows services and Fax Server Web Service. The Connector includes a build-in configurator for simple installation and configuration for system administrators.

High Level Architecture of Content Server FaxConnector

Click Image to Expand

Next Version
The upcoming version of our Connector further enhances the extensibility of the integration. A new plug-in architecture enables us to support complex business routing scenarios from Fax Server to Content Server. Businesses who require very specific and controlled mechanism in how fax documents flows into their content management system will be able to take advantage of the new design through customization and extensions. In addition to routing by fax users and DID numbers, for instance, inbound fax documents can also be routed based on text contents from optical character recognition (OCR) process, and be converted to searchable PDFs seamlessly. With outbound faxing from Content Server to Fax Server, we have added address book lookup functionality along with coversheets support.

Conclusion
The integration implementation was delivered very successfully. Our delivery was done on time, and the installation was completed fairly effortlessly. Working with our Global Services Consultant, Riten; and our customer contact Jennifer had been truly a blast. Nothing is more satisfying than having a delighted customer, and seeing the business value of our solution be realized. I have spoken with Jennifer since our engagement delivery, and she is pleased with both our solution as well as how well we have worked with her team throughout the project.

If you are interested in learning more about our Content Server FaxConnector; or if you would like to schedule a live demonstration, please contact us at captaris.ps[at]opentext.com.

Click to read the full case study.

If you are like my organization, you have clear policies on how to destruct your PC and server hard drives after they have run their useful lives. But have you thought about the implications of sensitive data stored on fax machines, photocopiers and printers?

Last week, the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) issued guidance on mitigating risks posed by information stored on fax machines, photocopiers and printers. Financial institutions regularly use these machines to process financial transactions, loan documents and other business information. These documents often contain confidential customer information.

The FDIC is concerned that when these devices are disposed of, there is a risk that confidential data may be compromised if the devices hard drives and flash memories are not destroyed, encrypted or erased. They are recommending that financial institutions be aware of the risks posed by these devices and implement appropriate processes and procedures to mitigate the data loss at the time of disposal of these machines.

One way financial institutions can eliminate this risk is to replace their fax machines with a fax server. Fax servers can do far more than just replace fax machines. Not only do they provide an audit trail of what has been sent and received, they can integrate with MFPs and be leveraged by back-end business applications. Users can send and receive faxes from their email inbox and faxes can be routed as part of a work flow (business process).

By using a fax server, the need for fax machines and their associated security risks are eliminated. Of course, with a fax server one still needs to have an appropriate server hard drive data retention and destruction policy but one reduces the risk from many fax machines to a single server.

Replacing a company’s fax machines with a fax server has been proven to reduce costs and eliminate paper waste. According to Gartner, a world leading information technology research and advisory company, businesses can reduce faxing costs by as much as 50% by using a fax server rather than stand-alone fax machines.

In several recent publications by Gartner, they have made it clear that an outsourced fax service option may not be appropriate for organizations if their fax traffic contains sensitive or confidential data such as medical records, financial information or personal details.

Healthcare organizations and other businesses who process sensitive customer data on fax machines can also benefit from the FDIC guidance. You can read the full FDIC guidance on mitigating risks posed by information stored on fax machines, photocopiers and printers at http://www.fdic.gov/news/news/financial/2010/fil10056.pdf.

As the makers of Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition, the world’s leading fax server that is used by hundreds of financial institutions around the world, we are proud of our customers’ accomplishments with our fax server technology. If you are interested in learning more about RightFax, please visit http://faxsolutions.opentext.com/ and http://www.futureoffax.com/.

If you have not guessed, I love faxing and secure document communication. You can contact me at mbrine[at]opentext.com and you can follow me on my Twitter business account at www.twitter.com/mattbrine.

Matthew Brine
Vice President
Fax and Document Distribution Group
Open Text Corporation

By Matthew Brine

Casey’s furniture, a family-owned business founded in 1921, is one of the longest-standing furniture retailers in Ireland. Their manual paper-based order fulfillment processes were causing costly delays, inefficiencies and errors. Many of the errors were expensive to fix and caused long delays for customers. Some employees were spending the equivalent of a full day per week on paper-based busywork to keep the business running.

Casey’s worked with Inpute Technologies, an Open Text Fax and Document solutions partner in Ireland, to digitize and streamline their order fulfillment process with an integrated, paper-free content solution utilizing Microsoft and Open Text technologies.

Casey’s orders are now routed for approval by Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Open Text Workflow Server, .NET edition and then electronically faxed to suppliers via Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition. Finally, they are stored in an accessible, easy-to-manage digital database with Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition. Employees also have the benefit of being able to send and receive faxes directly from their desktop and to utilize many of the other features of RightFax and Alchemy.

RightFax is the world’s leading fax server for sending and receiving mission critical documents such as purchase orders, invoices and legal agreements where secure transmission and proof of delivery is required. RightFax is used to reduce costs associated with standalone fax machines and paper-based processes.

RightFax has extensive integrations and product certifications with Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and other business applications and is the product of choice for unified communication vendors such as Cisco and MFP vendors like HP, Ricoh and Xerox. RightFax is a leader in production fax and FoIP (fax over IP) solutions and has over 100,000 servers installed worldwide.

Alchemy is a cost effective document imaging and archive solution for departments, work groups and small-to-medium businesses. Alchemy creates a digital file cabinet for your organization so you can securely store any document type and then find it within seconds, even years later. Thousands of customers use Alchemy today because it is easy to install, configure and use.

Among other results, Casey’s Furniture:

Eliminated fax machines and unessential printing for a reduction in printing and stationery costs of more than 60%.

• Reduced average time for order delivery to suppliers by up to eight days.
• Increased profit margins by meeting discount deadlines and reducing duplicate orders.
• Reduced order-related busywork close to 20 percent.
• Sped response time to customer inquiries by up to two weeks

Casey’s Furniture also improved customer service by increasing quality control and consistency of order-related processes, minimized redundant tasks across branches with central, integrated management and supported distribution efficiency with accurate, accessible information.

To read the full Casey’s Furniture customer success story, go to Casey’s Furniture Success Story.

Do you have a customer success story around RightFax or Alchemy? I would love to hear about it. You can contact me at mbrine[at]opentext.com and you can follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/mattbrine.

Matthew Brine
Vice President
Fax and Document Distribution Group
Open Text Corporation

http://faxsolutions.opentext.com/ and http://www.futureoffax.com/

The Open Text Fax and Document Distribution Group is pleased to announce the availability of a new program that allows FileNet Fax customers to convert their fax servers into fully licensed RightFax Editions of the Open Text Fax Server. This conversion program is available now and will be offered for a limited time.

Existing FileNet Fax customers can now convert FileNet Fax systems into fully licensed Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition servers through the Open Text Upgrade Now program. The Upgrade Now program allows FileNet Fax customers to upgrade to the latest version of software, Fax Server 9.4, and purchase the applicable support plan. For FileNet Fax customers making the transition to Open Text Fax Server, this program provides the following:

• Conversion of FileNet Fax to Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition license
• Full upgrade to Fax Server version 9.4
• Updated RightFax Connector for FileNet Fax
• One-year or multi-year support plan for Open Text Fax Server

For more information or to learn more about the transition from IBM FileNet Fax to Open Text Fax Server, please contact the Open Text Fax and Document Distribution Group by email or phone at (425) 638-4122.