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Fax Server Solutions for 2005?
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)?"
I haven't used it, since our management changed their minds, but it would have been my first choice:
http://www.hylafax.org/
We use VSIfax 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.
Edmund White
http://flickr.com/ewwhite
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.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
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
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
You might want to have a look at CapiSuite - 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 according driver. "
DAMN! Fed the troll again. Hey, where's the end of my finger?
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.
The Answer
i just know it stands for facsimile.
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
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
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
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 is a nice package too. Mac & Windows clients, no Linux, at least not yet.
We use Biscom Fax Server with a BrookTrout Fax card. Haven't had any issues with it. Does everything they say it does. So far we only have Win clients because we have no Mac or Linux stations that need to fax.
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.....d ucts_ftove r.htm
http://www.datadesigns.com/products/pro
Sig Hansen?
Have a look at Relayfax. They have opensourced their engine on Sourceforge 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.
The weathers here - Wish you were beautiful
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,
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
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...
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/faxing/
Get a G5.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet