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Businesses Communications Technology

Fax Server Solutions for 2005? 39

Posted by Cliff from the business-technology dept.
Glove d'OJ asks: "For a recent project at work, we are investigating enterprise-wide fax server solutions. Ideally, it would have a rich API for custom development, as well as all of the standard 'fax as a printer' and 'email out a fax' capabilities. Throughout all of my research, however, most of the decent reviewing sites all appear to have last reviewed this technology sometime last century, i.e., 1999 (or in 2000 for the purists.) I cannot find a single somewhat-recent review. Timeliness is definitely important in looking for the API. if the latest documentation refers to 'that new fangled C++' and was written in the pre-C# era, I could have some rough choices ahead. Is this an old technology that is no longer in vogue, or is there a single clear choice with no competition (thus not even requiring a recent review)?"
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Fax Server Solutions for 2005? More

Fax Server Solutions for 2005?

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  • hylafax (Score:5, Informative)

    by dtfinch ( 661405 ) * on Thursday April 21, 2005 @11:45AM (#12303034) Journal
    I haven't used it, since our management changed their minds, but it would have been my first choice:
    http://www.hylafax.org/

    • Re:hylafax (Score:4, Interesting)

      by shufler ( 262955 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @11:59AM (#12303165) Homepage
      Hylafax is pretty good, plus it's open source. I too would have implemented it before, but the higher ups decided to go with j2 [j2.com], simply because they have the infrastructure already in place. j2 should allow the submitter to do everything they need, plus more.

    • HylaFax is very nice but I have a Lucent Max I'd like to use its modems for Hylafax. Basically if you telnet to port 9000 you get an AT command session to one of the modems. I've been looking for a serial port emulator that when you open /dev/fakettyx it simply opens a telnet session to s.o.me.ip:9000 and relays data back and forth.

      I've found plenty of things that do the opposite (telnet to them and they open a real serial port) but so far my quest has been unfulfilled.

      • Have you investigated modifying Hylafax to do this? I am not familiar with the source, but I wouldn't imagine it would involve digging too deep if you know C++.

        Is it a work thing? If so someone like ifax.com might well write you a patch for some dorrah.
    • The best thing about hylafax is its flexability.

      In my organization, we have hylafax receiving incoming faxes, dropping them to a high end laser printer (to get away from the horrible reliability of even high end fax devices), and droping it in PDF form to a read only smb share. That part is incase something bad happens to the paper copy, and for our document archival system.

      For outgoing, we have a simple VB app for windows systems, that will take a scanned document, or any pdf, tiff, ps or text file, pro
      • We haven't implemented it just yet (waiting for the local telco to install the needed incoming/outgoing lines to the school board office), but we're going with Hylafax as well.

        For incoming faxes, we have 50 fax numbers mapped to 6 incoming DID lines, connected to some fancy fax device connect to a Hylafax server. That converts the incoming fax to an e-mail with an attached PDF, and drops it into a site e-mail box. Secretaries at each site check the box and either print it, delete it, or forward it on via

  • VSIfax (Score:5, Informative)

    by ewwhite ( 533880 ) * on Thursday April 21, 2005 @11:51AM (#12303097) Homepage
    We use VSIfax [esker.com] with our Linux application. It's very easy to integrate into an existing application. It does the print-to-fax and mail interface for Windows clients. From a *nix host, it's a command-line interface. VSIfax is expensive, but it's reliable and does what you need.
    • I didn't find it terribly reliable, and more importantly it was mysterious. I hate mysterious software far more than buggy software.

      After years of running fine on SCO UNIX, the same configuration and faxmodem was brought over to Linux (I give discounts for converting businesses from SCO to Linux...it's my way of giving something back to the world), and it proved extremely cantankerous. The servers would just stop working on a semi-daily basis. Nothing in the logs. They just stopped. Worse, they refuse

  • hylafax + some glue-code (Score:5, Informative)

    by i.r.id10t ( 595143 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @12:00PM (#12303179)
    I just setup a small fax server for a small insurance office (15 employees) on a old Pentium 200 with 64mb ram and 2 USR PCI modems (class 1 fax capabilites) - 2 dedicated lines, one for in and one for out. Hylafax and some glue (LAMP, php-cli, mailm, and some bash script). Print to a samba printer (search for smbfax, then re-write it in a few lines of bash), sends email to smbusername@localhost, user checks email, enters destination number and some cover page info, fax sends.

    Its been running for just over a month now, 3000 faxes in, 2000 faxes out, no issues.

  • RightFax (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MikeDawg ( 721537 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @12:03PM (#12303208) Homepage Journal

    The company that I recently joined is/has been using RightFax, and it seems like a quality product, I spoke with our local helpdesk and there are a very low occurance of problems with it.

    A link to RightFax [captaris.com]

    • My former company also used RightFax. I moved from there to a company that delivers fax via sneakernet. It is like moving to the horse/buggy era.

  • Capisuite (Score:2, Informative)

    by leif.singer ( 622715 )
    You might want to have a look at CapiSuite [capisuite.de] - I'm not sure if that's exactly what you're looking for, but it sure is easily customizable using Python. From the project description: "CapiSuite is an ISDN telecommunication suite providing easy to use telecommunication functions which can be controlled from Python scripts. Currently, mainly voice functions and fax sending/receiving are supported. It uses a CAPI-compatible driver for accessing the ISDN-hardware, so you'll need an Eicon or AVM card with the accor

  • zetafax (Score:2, Informative)

    by zerkon ( 838861 )
    We use zetafax at my work, and to be honest although I don't believe its very adaptable (no API's or anything to develop in) it is just about flexible enough where you don't even need it to be, we very rarely have any problems with it, I'm fairly impressed.

  • Active Fax (Score:3, Informative)

    by mnmn ( 145599 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @01:39PM (#12304013) Homepage
    www.actfax.com.

    Tried it once for a few users, they grew completely dependent on it, next everyone wanted it. There are so many ways to fax: email, drop folder, print to fax, and all faxes can be saved in an ODBC location. Has its own user administration, per-user cover pages and great scheduling features.

    I'd do anything to have a linux version. They did apparently once have a solaris version, dont know where that went

  • Fax Server Solution: (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fozzmeister ( 160968 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @01:44PM (#12304056) Homepage
    Email!

    OK well you can sign a peice of paper then fax it, which becomes a contract, I don't think you can do this with email but thats' the only downside.
  • This [4sightfax.com] is a nice package too. Mac & Windows clients, no Linux, at least not yet.

  • Lack of currency (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @03:43PM (#12305377)
    The reason for the lack of current reviews is simply because of a lack of "current" products. Fax technology has changed little if any at all in the past ten years so, what was a viable solution ten years ago, is still just as viable today. New features have been tried. Some, like routing, have been tried repeatedly without being truly successful. There just isn't a whole lot more that you can add to a fax server while maintaining interoperability with the world's fax machines.

    As far as recommending a fax product, there are numerous commercial ones available, some are even "New and Improved" but, since you asked on Slashdot, I'll recommend the open source choice, Hylafax, despite your C# requirement. It's open so you can develop on or against it to your heart's content. Something I doubt any of the commercial offerings will permit.

    This brings us to your final requirement where the api's language must be modern. I'm not certain, but, I think that Hylafax is written in C so it definitely doesn't fit your C# requirements, despite the fact that the two languages are not mutually exclusive unless you make them so in your own head. But, requiring that a decades old solution be "up-to-date" in terms of the programming language seems a bit unreasonable to me. Must a fax application be rewritten in the latest fad language solely for the the sake of the language?

    What I suspect you will wind up doing is some VB script that uses DCOM to print-to-fax from a Windows 2003 server.
  • We use Captaris RightFax here normally as the inbound and outbound faxing tool. We bought COM-enabled APIs to interface with it. We wrote our own custom software to route messages through the fax server.

    Overall, a win for everyone. It was relatively inexpensive for our needs... and it faxes too!

    http://www.captaris.com/rightfax/
  • FMP.....
    http://www.datadesigns.com/products/prod ucts_ftove r.htm

  • Have a look at Relayfax [relayfax.com]. They have opensourced their engine on Sourceforge [sourceforge.net] although it is a Windows only C++ solution.

    I just recently installed Relayfax at a clients site and it is working well.

    --
    Evolution - Still a theory just dont tell its religious zealouts, the Evolutionians.

  • It's all about the HylaFax (Score:3, Informative)

    by ChrisJones ( 23624 ) <`cmsj-slashdot' `at' `tenshu.net'> on Thursday April 21, 2005 @07:12PM (#12308293) Homepage Journal
    Get yourself a PRI card (PRI being a bunch of ISDN lines in a single cable) such as an Eicon Diva and run HylaFax.
    It is an extremely capable fax server and there are a bunch of clients for it for Windows.
    I run a HylaFax server at work, it's a 2Ghz 1GB machine with a 30 channel diva card. Our peak load so far is a little under 3000 faxes sent and slightly more than 3000 received per week, which was handled with only 8 of the phone lines active. The various conversions between postscript and tiff are pretty quick, so the system load stayed pretty low). The machine was also doing database, email, intranet and dns duties at the peak point.

    We don't actually use any of the client software, so I can't speak directly on those in any depth, but I believe they are quite numerous and vary in quality/price; instead we have a samba printer which is actually a shell script that converts the postscript received from windows into a tiff and feeds it to hylafax, extracting the destination fax number from a specially formatted string in the document (this is fantastically useful for batch sending reports and you can hide the ugly special string by colouring the font white ;)
    At both the point of receiving a fax and that of sending a fax, control of all behaviour is handled with shell scripts and some awking. This means the server is pretty much infinitely flexible. You can get a service from the telecom provider (it may be included) that identifies the caller's number (if available) and the number they called (because you will probably have several aliased to the line). All of this information is available in the script, so you can get a bunch of cheap DID numbers on the line and give each dept or even each person a fax line, which will be identified by the script and any faxes sent to them will be emailed to them as pdfs, or printed to their printer, or (as we do) placed in a directory visible to a webserver and indexed in a database, so people can view their faxes online. That obviously required some external work, but it's a very simple sort of script to write, as are most of the things people want to do :)
    HylaFax also has an outstanding mailing list, with several very active and very helpful people. If that fails, you can throw a couple of hundred bucks at ifax.com for some of their time to fix it for you.

    You do get the odd persistant offender of a crappy old fax machine that it just won't talk to, but there is a lot of tweaking you can do if you want, to try and work around this. We have a single manual fax line and machine for the situations when things simply will not talk to our card/hylafax, but I think it's less than 0.1% of our customers and I have done zero tweaking to workround it so far.

    Originally we used a machine with 8 analogue modems hanging off it and it still coped very well, but the modems were easily confused and hung a lot, which is what pushed us to spend the money on a PRI card, but it was well worth it because the DSP modems on it never hang (or "wedge" in hylafax terms) so it requires almost no intervention from me for extended periods, which is ultimately the reason I like it so much. When you finish setting it up right, it Just Works[tm]

    Cheers,
    • If 24 lines isn't enough, cisco and extreme offer hardware that will let you fill an 45mbps or larger sized pipe with faxes.

      Your best research tool is the vendors. Shoot off a mess of emails outlining what you want to do and you'll have a wastebasket full of options, for sorting through, by the end of the day.
      • You'll have a wastebasket full of marketing waste ;)

        Asking a bunch of people who know about it is far better than asking a bunch of companies who want to sell it to you ;)

        The qeustion is finding those people though. This guy chose to ask slashdot, so he might be screwed ;)

  • SBS 2003 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by yarisbandit ( 608829 )
    Windows SBS 2003 has a fax server built in? Might be a little light for your needs, but we use it at work quite happily...

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