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Faxing Solution
Too much of your money circulating around your fax operation?
Are you sick
and tired of walking into the office every morning and finding a
pile of unsolicited fax advertisements in your fax machine?
On estimate,
each junk fax received and redundant printout page costs the
average of $0.25 in paper and toner. And these faxes tie up the
machine when needing to send something out or while waiting to
receive something important. It's no laughing matter when the
pitches for cheap vacations, office supplies and cell
phones hog fax
time, drain toner and use up paper, daily. You're paying for
them to try and sell you something you usually don't want.
Unlike intrusive telemarketers and junk mail, which courts
protect as commercial free speech, unsolicited faxes fall into a
gray area of the law. But why spend time and money trying to
stop the unstoppable? Fax industry officials say the legal
bans won't hold up in court because the faxes are
constitutionally protected as commercial free speech.
Even if junk faxes can hypothetically be stopped, there’s
another angle to the expense of running a fax machine. We all
do it - printing pages after redundant pages from your computer
just so you can fax them off and then throw them out? Wasn’t
the computer age supposed to make for a paperless age?
Let us help! We can show you how to use fax sharing to
centralize your faxing department, bring paper use to a minimum,
integrate your office applications, and control what comes in
and what goes out. And best of all, get rid of your fax
machine!
Through the use of GFI FAXmaker's shared faxing resources, fax
sharing permits users to fax documents directly from their
computers without ever having to print them out on paper. This
reduces paper consumption and printer usage and is more
convenient for staff. Network faxing applications can be
integrated with email contact lists, and faxes can be sent to
groups of recipients. Specialized hardware is available for
high-volume faxing to large groups. Incoming faxes can also be
handled by the network and legitimate ones forwarded directly to
users' computers via email, again eliminating the need to print
a hard copy of every fax - and leaving your office fax machine
free or for jobs that require it.
In the
News:
eCourier builds a robust and secure infrastructure
using GFI products
GFI products give UK courier
company peace of mind and more time to focus on its core
business
London, UK, 25 May 2005 –
eCourier, a UK-based company
with the mission to revolutionize the same-day courier industry
in Great Britain and beyond, has turned to several GFI products
to create a robust and secure infrastructure.
eCourier uses the
GFI FAXmaker
fax server, GFI MailEssentials server-based anti-spam
protection, GFI MailSecurity email security and GFI MailArchiver
to archive corporate email.
By providing peace of mind that
its communications systems are functioning proficiently and
effectively, eCourier's use of the GFI product quartet enables
the company to better focus on its core business of supplying a
competitive, fast and efficient courier service. GFI has now
issued a new case study detailing this deployment.
Decrease in lead times and
increase in revenue with GFI FAXmaker
To automate its fax systems, eCourier chose GFI
FAXmaker for Exchange 12. The product offers several benefits,
including direct dial fax lines, the ability to receive two
faxes instantaneously or send/receive simultaneously (with
ISDN2), user ability to receive faxes as PDF documents and send
faxes from their desktops and the facility to send text messages
via the email client, among others. GFI FAXmaker grants
eCourier speedy and secure use of fax technology, allowing the
company to reduce lead times and to increase revenue. Jay
Bregman, the company’s co-founder and Technology Director said
that “with GFI FAXmaker, less than five minutes per day is spent
on administrivia, leaving 75% more selling time”.
A true passion for its products
One other aspect has impressed eCourier about GFI,
"apart from the strengths of the products themselves": "We have
been continually impressed by the level of passion GFI has for
its products-evidenced in the quality of support and the
frequency of new, exciting features for existing products." Mr.
Bregman also feels that GFI produces upgrades of merit, making
it worthy to subscribe to maintenance agreements.
How it Works
Unlike many of the standalone fax server products on the market,
GFI FAXmaker for Exchange provides a connector into the native
Exchange environment, allowing you to leverage user’s existing
familiarity with working from Microsoft Outlook. The basic
principal of network faxing is not unlike using a desktop system
with a dedicated fax modem to send and receive faxes. However,
in the case of GFI FAXmaker for Exchange, the server acts as the
centralized facility for the sending and receiving of faxes,
while also handling message routing functions.
When fax messages are received by GFI FAXmaker for Exchange, it
will route them to the correct user(s) according to the rules
defined by the administrator. For example, messages can be
forwarded to the mailbox of an individual user, to a common
mailbox dedicated for faxes, or to an Exchange public folder.
These routing features are part of what helps to make GFI
FAXmaker for Exchange such a powerful product.
System Requirements
Of course, in order to be able to send and receive faxes via
this Email to fax gateway, an appropriate fax device is
required. This can be a traditional Class 1 or 2 fax modem, ISDN
card, or a dedicated fax board from a company like Brooktrout.
Once the server has one or more of these devices installed and
configured, the server component of GFI FAXmaker for Exchange
can be installed on the Exchange Server. While the installation
of the server software is very straightforward, one potential
issue involves the need for minimal schema modification in
Active Directory environments. As such, schema modification must
be enabled on your forest’s Schema Master prior to attempting
the installation. Once installed, GFI FAXmaker runs as just
another Windows 2000 service.
Along with the GFI FAXmaker for Exchange server component, there
is also an optional client component that can be installed on
user desktops. The client software installs both the FAXmaker
printer on client systems, along with the FAXmaker viewer, a
program to view any faxes received. If only used to send faxes
from within Outlook, installation of the client software is not
explicitly required.
Users Sending and Receiving Faxes
The GFI Faxmaker software is intuitive and easy for users to
figure out. The concept of “printing” the fax is easy to
understand once Outlook automatically openes a message with the
fax attached. A user simply choses the recipient of the
fax (using the user’s “Business Fax” entry) from either their
Outlook Contacts or the Exchange Global Address List, as shown
below.
Ultimately, a cover page is
attached to the fax by GFI FAXmaker at the server level. The
information is gathered from the To, From, and Subject lines,
with the message on the cover page gathered from the contents of
the what would normally be the email message itself.
There is the ability to receive
faxes directly into Outlook Inbox folders. Upon receipt, the
user treats the fax as any standard file attachment, which is
opened in the GFI FAXmaker viewer, as shown below.
Fax Routing
One of the obvious issues when implementing a fax server
solution is how the fax server software knows which mailbox to
route a fax to upon receipt. GFI FAXmaker for Exchange supports
six different methods of routing faxes to an appropriate
mailbox. While each method has associated advantages and
disadvantages, support for the various methods provides the
maximum flexibility possible.
The six methods include:
CSID - When any fax machine sends
a fax, it includes a Caller Sender Identification (CSID) at the
top of the fax. This method is useful for routing messages when
all faxes from a particular company are destined for a single
user.
DID - If your company has a line
with multiple Direct Inward Dial (DID) numbers, each of these
virtual numbers can be associated with a user or department,
allowing routing to occur based on the DID number the fax was
sent to.
DTMF - Dual Tone Multi Frequency
is a technique whereby the user sending the fax presses a key
combination that represents the user once the call is connected.
Although this method is highly scalable, it relies upon a
correctly configured PBX or the sender understanding the
process.
OCR - Optical Character
Recognition (OCR) can also be used to route faxes with FAXmaker
for Exchange. When OCR is used for routing, GFI FAXmaker will
scan the text looking for names or keywords associated with an
account and route the fax accordingly. Unfortunately, this
method is only about 70% accurate, and cannot distinguish
between users with the same name.
Line - Line routing is a very
straightforward method whereby a physical fax line is associated
with a user or department. A useful choice for routing faxes as
the departmental level, it still requires a dedicated fax line
for each recipient, making it impractical for faxing to many
individual users.
MSN - MSN routing is used by ISDN
only. This method works similar to DID routing, except that it
doesn’t require the purchase of individual DID phone numbers.
Most ISDN lines support more than one MSN number by default.
Manual - Manual routing is a
method very similar to traditional faxing where all faxes are
routed to a single internal mailbox or exchange public folder.
From here, a designated person would examine and forward all
received faxes by mail.
Cover Pages
One handy feature in GFI FAXmaker for Exchange is its ability to
allow you to design and implement your own custom fax cover
pages. By default only a generic cover page is implemented, but
both HTML- and RTF-based cover pages are supported. If you plan
to implement a fancy custom cover page for your organization,
your best bet is to import a pre-designed version that includes
the appropriate (and very simple) tags in order for the To,
From, Subject, and Company fields to be properly populated by
GFI FAXmaker. A nice touch with the cover page feature is the
ability to define which users are associated with a given
design. Beyond cover pages, the program also allows you to
define headers and footers that can be added to outgoing faxes.
Filtering Junk Faxes
Much like spam email today, junk faxes have long been a problem
for companies. While most manual fax machines are incapable of
blocking junk faxes, GFI FAXmaker for Exchange has the ability
to automatically delete junk faxes according to the CSID of the
sending device. Furthermore, the program also includes an option
to delete any fax received without a CSID. GFI FAXmaker for
Exchange also allows copies of any junk faxes to be stored to a
specified folder, just in case.
FAXmaker Monitor
Like most of the solutions from GFI Software, GFI FAXmaker for
Exchange also includes a dedicated monitoring tool. FAXmaker
Monitor provides access to two utilities, Server Monitor and
Queued Faxes. As the name suggests, the Queued Faxes tool will
allow you to view information about all faxes waiting to be
sent, which line they are using, and so forth. The Server
Monitor tool (shown below) displays the status of faxes being
sent or received, allows you to restart the server, and also
debug or abort faxes in progress.
Contact us
now, and put us to work for you!
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