Is it possible to send a fax thru IS. I need to send a PO thats available in the database to the client as a fax. What kind of setup do I need
Hi
Also wish to ask if this could be done using portal or any of the webMethods suite. My environment is in solaris but I could think about putting an IS on a windows box if that could help.
Thahir
Hi Thahir,
It is not possible to directly send a fax from IS. However there are software and corresponding drivers which can be installed on a system, which can do the required job. You can send an email with the fax number as the recipient which in-turn will fax the body of the email to fax number. Check with the data center/network guys, they will know more about this.
-Rajesh Rao
From IS Emailing the PO to the efax number will be the option, if your network guys and trading partner who wants to receive the documents via fax can support this communication.So get the efax emailid and test the same.
HTH,
RMG
Good point RMG. Just expanding on RMG’s point about efax …
Check out Efax at this URL: http://efax.com. When I was in the US a few years back, I used Efax to send and receive (personal) faxes and had no problems at all. I know companies that use them for corporate fax communications.
An innovative thing that Efax do is they receive faxes for you, and OCR them to text. Then they send both the image of the fax, as well as it’s text, as email attachment.
So Thahir, theoretically, you can do the reverse cycle too. That is, your customers should be able to print out a form, fax it to the Efax number, and IS should be able to use the WmEDI package’s convertToValues functionality on the OCR-ed text to populate an order automatically.
My consulting business uses eFax for all inbound faxing. I occasionally use it for outbound faxes via email as well.
That being said, there are a number of commercial quality fax servers and service bureaus that are probably better suited to higher transaction volumes and more demanding quality-of-service levels than eFax.
Captaris Rightfax, FacSys and BisCom are examples of products that have been around for long enough to get it right.
Many corporations use these solutions to create fax gateways that allow their email users to send faxes. These products also usually allow faxes to be sent by embedded commands in the data sent to special purpose print drivers. That’s the way we did it when I worked for an automotive lending company.
Finally, don’t forget about service bureaus such as InterFax that provide web services interfaces that allow you to send faxes with binary data encoded as Base64 or text data.
Mark
The Interfax web services API looks pretty thorough. I’ve attached a sample of a the fax they sent when I signed up as a developer.
Mark
Interfax Sample Fax
interfax_fax_sample.tif (24.2 k)
A correction.
Above, I had posted:
> An innovative thing that Efax do is they receive faxes for you, and
> OCR them to text.
Actually, it looks like the OCR is done on the user’s desktop (not on the Efax server), using some extra free software Efax provide. Sorry, it’s been a few years since I used Efax and it didn’t do OCR then.