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)?"

Comments

hylafax

[dtfinch]

I haven't used it, since our management changed their minds, but it would have been my first choice:
http://www.hylafax.org/

VSIfax

[ewwhite]

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.

hylafax + some glue-code

[i.r.id10t]

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.

Capisuite

[leif.singer]

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. "

zetafax

[zerkon]

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

[mnmn]

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

It's all about the HylaFax

[ChrisJones]

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,