Its the beginning (give or take a few days) of the month and that means its time for me to check the stats for our videos. Each month I go check out the YouTube Insight reports for each of the videos I have published over the last few years. I enjoy doing this because it shows me what people are interested in right now. As the name of the reporting engine implies, it gives me insight into what I should be looking at for future videos. Some of the results are as I expect, but there are always surprises as well.
Despite it being one of my favorite topics, I can understand why the video on Creating Custom Administration Tools is not at the top of the most watched list. It never has been anywhere close to most popular, but I think its fantastic. That video covers using the Microsoft Management Console to create a remote building tool for Alchemy. But you could just as easily use the concepts to build a tool for RightFax or any other application you need to manage. I plan on updating this with a Server 2008 management tools version in the next few months.
My most popular video for the last few months has been one about sending faxes from Outlook. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Outlook is one of the most popular ways our customers interact with the RightFax Server. The fact that it gets 200 times the hits of the MMC video is understandable.
Another interesting stat is that the second most popular video for August 2011 was one that was posting in October of 2009. Its the one about Installing and Configuring Fax over IP. That has been one of the most consistently popular videos since it was posted, though it didn’t start out that way.
Not only do I look at stats per video per month, I also look at how the videos do in their first 30, 60, and 90 days. The Install & Configure FoIP video didn’t do very good on its first 90 days, but the Faxing Just Got Easy video performed the best for that time span. Again, thats understandable, because it was embedded on a few different properties.
Do you have any favorite videos over the last couple years? Anything you wish I would cover? Let me know in the comments below.
by Kieran Lane, of Softech, a Premier OpenText Partner and Authorized Support Provider
In this fun video, we staged the ultimate faxing championship: RightFax versus a traditional fax machine. See how RightFax can save you and your coworkers up to 10 minutes for each fax sent. Learn how easy it is to send, receive and confirm faxes without interrupting your other work. With proven return on investment and measurable productivity gains, there may be only one drawback to RightFax—less exercise from stair climbing. Of course with the time and money RightFax saves, going to the gym will be easier too.
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.
Feature Pack 1 of the Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition v9.4, delivers interoperability with Microsoft Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging (UM). The new UM settings allow for inbound faxes to be referred to the Fax Server instead of being processed only through Exchange 2010 UM. Faxes are now handled by a fax server but still processed where end users are typically used to receiving faxes in Outlook with Exchange 2007 UM.
The problem is that with this new technology comes the scary question that comes to mind for anyone who is going to have to implement this and is not familiar with Unified Messaging in Exchange, “Do I really have to time to install Exchange 2010 and then study how the Unified Messaging piece works just to setup inbound faxing”? Rather than you spending days installing and reading about UM concepts, we created two videos that should pretty much get you up to speed (assuming you have about 20 minutes).
Configuring Exchange 2010 UM for Inbound Faxing – Part 1:
How to configure Exchange 2010 to listen for CNG fax tones
Setup a UM Dial Plan
Setup a UM IP Gateway
Setup a UM MailBox Policy.
Configuring Exchange 2010 UM for Inbound Faxing – Part 2:
How to create a Receive Connector (for security)
Configure the Open Text Fax Server
Configure a AudioCodes MP-114 (media gateway)
Send a test to see it work
We also have a new white paper on faxing with Exchange Server 2010 UM. Download here.
There is a big change in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Unified Messaging (UM) that opens an opportunity for the Open Text Fax Server to help. With the Exchange 2007 UM, there was an option for sending inbound faxes to Outlook clients. In Exchange 2010 UM, the internal feature for inbound faxing was discontinued but an option to redirect fax calls to third-party vendors to provide the capability was added. Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition is able to provide that server for Exchange 2010 UM as of Feature Pack 1.
We have developed a brief video presentation to explain this.
Exchange Server 2007 UM provided an option for inbound faxing but did not provide options for outbound faxing. With Exchange 2010 UM, there is not a built-in option for either inbound or outbound faxing but there is an option to configure the server to redirect fax traffic to the Open Text Fax Server. The Open Text Fax Server Exchange Connector has been available for inbound and outbound faxing in both Exchange 2007 and 2010 but this does not work within the Unified Messaging roles.
Microsoft published a case study on how Open Text developed this integration and it is available here.
We have a new white paper on Inbound Faxing with Exchange Server 2010 Unified Messaging. Download here.
Wikipedia defines redundancy as, “the duplication of critical components of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system, usually in the case of a backup or fail-safe.”
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundancy_(engineering). Makes sense so far, right? We all know however, that redundant systems can increase overall system availability too, meaning users or processes can run more efficiently. Still for being such a broad topic with many variables, we do see all kinds of monikers used when it comes to this subject: High-availability; load-balancing; fault-tolerant, disaster recovery, and so on. From an abstract perspective all of them are in some way descriptive of redundancy, with the end result real easy to understand: No loss of data and interruptions to your business.
A business interruption can be anything; telephone or internet failures; a corrupt database; a computer virus, a bad disk drive, a failed CPU in the datacenter, or any unplanned system downtime. They can even be as far reaching as a full scale disaster; floods, power outages, hurricanes, or even terror attacks. It goes without saying, but measures must be made to ensure that all mission critical applications are in some way redundant. This could mean anything from a simple backup to a full-blown high available, redundant system. The choice is yours, and the options are plentiful.
Yet, the biggest challenge when considering redundancy for a software application like an enterprise fax server is exactly how much redundancy do you want? After all, Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition has a multi-layered architecture in which various components, databases, or processes can be placed into redundant scenarios that can ensure high uptimes while preserving faxes and data from being lost. This is good. Preserving lost faxes means preserving your business after all.
Getting down to some specifics: When architecting your fax solution to provide maximum uptime it is helpful to understand the difference between fault-tolerance and system redundancy, as both can be addressed differently and have different ramifications to a business that relies on fax. A fault-tolerant system will continue to work if a single fax server component fails. Redundancy on the other hand, allows the entire fax enterprise to continue operating if one major component of that system fails. In a redundant scenario each component of the fax server must be duplicated. Typically it is common to have two fax servers operating in tandem, so that if one server fails the other server will continue to operate.
Load-balancing and Shared Services: This is a scenario in which a fax server shares its database of users, groups, printers, etc. amongst an enterprise of multiple fax servers. Typical with any company having more than one physical location, combined with the advancements made in Fax Server architecture, less fax server resources are now needed at the remote locations, making it easier to build in redundancy while leveraging your company LAN/WAN. In the end, a proper load balancing and shared services scenario will allow Fax Server to literally share its various server services and fax images across a network. In fact, many will say that this is very similar to an active-active cluster, in which shared resources not only ensure backup, but provides processing optimization and single location to administer. Furthermore, Fax Server is optimized for high-availability, in which the database resources are shared such that the application is providing a centralized location for all company users, groups, and other data object, it does not have to be replicated anywhere else. Here’s an example: A fax server in Los Angeles will be “aware” of users located in the New York office because the database is shared. There is no need to have user data replicated across the enterprise. That shared database in L.A. can obviously be placed into a database cluster for redundancy purposes. All in all, taking advantage of Open Text Fax Server’s shared service architecture will boost your system reliability and your business’s ability to run without failure.
A “Cold Spare” Scenario: A cold spare configuration is intended for use in the event of a long-term system shut down, a failure, or any other system interruption that may take more time to repair. Typically this is implemented as two fax servers on two hardware servers (or virtualized) as a primary server and a secondary server. It is important to note that a cold spare is not used in production but is available so that it will expedite recovery. A cold spare system is typically stored in an isolated or remote location and is considered to be “offline”. Its purpose is to be activated in the event of a primary system failure. This is a straightforward approach and offers an affordable way to have a level of redundancy if you can tolerate some manual intervention.
Active-Passive Clustering: Typically, cluster environments protect against an application/service failure, system/hardware failure, site failure and even downtimes due to planned maintenance. In the case of Open Text Fax Server where a primary fax server had a failure, the business would revert to a secondary server to continue fax processing. That is of course, if a second fax server system has been setup to function as a passive “node”. What’s nice about Fax Server’s approach to this is the “node” doesn’t have to be the entire server application. Since Fax Server connects to the telephone system, there is a way to leverage the architecture to realize the benefits of clustering. Using remote Doctransports will allow you to divide up your fax channels between one active node (a.k.a a Open Text Fax Server) and a passive node (a.k.a. a backup copy of Fax Server). You still get the same channel capacity 100% of the time, but in the event of a node failure, those fax channels simply “see” the other node and keep on processing your critical fax documents. Combine this with the shared database and services and you’re now starting to build a high available redundant system unparalleled in efficiency and effectiveness.
Lots of choices and options are available to build a redundant Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition system and keep your business up and running. As stated before, the options are plentiful, no matter what size your company. Be sure to work with a Open Text Fax Server VAR or Partner who can help design a plan that meets your needs.
September 8, 2011 
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