How have fax server products matured in 2 years?
Faxing from the desktop saves time, and products that serve the needs of organizations of all sizes saturate the fax server market. Two years ago, Windows NT Magazine examined this market in a series of four reviews that discussed the features of 20 fax server products (see "Zen and the Art of Fax Servers," December 1997; "The Fast Track on Fax Server Software," January 1998; "So Many Faxes, So Little Time," February 1998; and "The Fax Stops Here," March 1998). In this article, I revisit the field to see how the market has matured.
Fax server products fall into the following categories: desktop (individual user), workgroup (small office), departmental (workgroup within a company), company, and enterprise (large multisite company). A sixth category consists of specialized or niche products that don't fit into the preceding categories.
Because looking at fax servers in every category could easily consume several dedicated issues of this magazine, I cover enterprise-level fax servers. Enterprise fax servers comprise two broad subcategories: production and network fax servers. The difference is in the fax server's purpose. Production fax servers integrate into your production environment—your accounts receivable system, for example—to perform an automated task such as faxing invoices to hundreds or even thousands of customers. Network fax servers can send faxes from desktop systems on a network and route inbound faxes to users' email inboxes, so users never need to leave their desks to send or receive faxes. For information about how I tested the products, see the sidebar "Testing Fax Server Products," page 172.
I looked for products that provide enterprise-level features such as centralized management, cost accounting, load balancing, integration with email systems, and, for software-only products, the ability to work with high-end fax boards such as Brooktrout Technology's TR114. Many of the products I look at also provide Least Cost Routing (LCR) and server load balancing and integrate with mission-critical applications such as SAP R/3 or PeopleSoft.
In any large environment, centralized management is important. In networks where servers might be hundreds or even thousands of miles apart, administrators can't always travel to the fax server to configure and maintain it. With a centralized management tool such as a client management application, administrators can perform these administrative functions from their desks.
In large distributed computing environments, LCR can help reduce the cost of sending faxes. For example, if your offices in Los Angeles and New York connect with a dedicated network link and a user in New York needs to send faxes to clients in the Los Angeles area, you can reduce long-distance charges by forwarding the fax from New York for the Los Angeles server to send. LCR lets you configure two or more fax servers on your network to hand off fax traffic to another server when doing so makes sense.
Server load balancing lets an overloaded fax server hand off traffic to another fax server. Without server load balancing, if server A is overloaded, faxes might take many minutes or even hours to send, even though server B sits idle. One product I reviewed, GFI FAX & VOICE's FAXmaker for Exchange 6.0, has a line-based load-balancing feature that uses outbound-only lines during light traffic periods but at peak traffic times employs unused inbound lines for outbound traffic. Several implementations of load balancing exist, including a master/server configuration, rules-based configuration, and free-form, in which all fax servers on a network operate as one large fax cluster. I discuss unique load-balancing features in some of the individual product reviews.
The Players
I found 15 enterprise-level fax server products to test, a combination of software-only products and turnkey products that provide an integrated hardware and software solution. The software products are Copia's FaxFacts, Esker's Faxgate for Windows NT—Enterprise Edition, Fenestrae's Faxination, FAXmaker, Omtool's Fax Sr. Enterprise, DPD International's Gold-Fax for Windows NT, serVonic's ixiFAX, Interstar Technologies' LightningFAX 6.5, SCH Technologies' Merkur, AVT's RightFAX, and V-Systems Incorporated's (VSI's) VSI-FAX. The turnkey fax solutions are Biscom's FAXCOM 7000NT, SpectraFAX's Fax Liaison, Castelle's FaxPress 5000, and TOPCALL International's TOPCALL server. For a summary of all the products' features, see Table 1, page 184.
Results
Overall, testing went surprisingly well. I encountered only one small problem installing a software package, and the vendor easily resolved that difficulty. All the products sent faxes easily, and no problems arose. Each fax server I tested handled everything I asked it to do. Modern fax hardware is so fast that only the slowest part of the faxing process—transmitting the fax to its destination over a telephone line—delays completion of the task.
Inbound routing of faxes to Microsoft Exchange Server was equally easy, although I occasionally had difficulty with some software packages' dual-tone multifrequency (DTMF) routing capability. Because DTMF routing is inherently unstable (most vendors agree it should be the method of last resort), I didn't penalize products that occasionally had a problem with this feature.
When I was able to use Calling Station Identification (CSID) routing, I merely configured the software to route all messages from my company's CSID, IDEAMATION, to my email inbox. This form of routing is much more stable than DTMF and worked flawlessly. However, CSID has a problem: If someone sends separate faxes to different people in your organization, CSID can't determine to which recipient the software needs to route each fax. Consequently, your server might send faxes to the wrong person.
All the products have good centralized management capabilities, although some approach management differently than others. LCR worked flawlessly in the products that offer it. The only product that offers line load balancing, FAXmaker, uses outbound-only lines when they're available and uses inbound-outbound lines when outbound-only lines aren't available. Some products let you configure server load balancing, but most products configure this feature for you so that subsequent servers simply appear as additional lines in the fax server environment.
My testing left me with the strong impression that the fax server market has matured significantly over the past 2 years. I find choosing a review winner difficult. At the base level, all the products fax well, and all are stable. What differentiates the products from one another are additional features. For example, some products can integrate with UNIX systems by using Common Internet File System (CIFS), whereas others offer an X client for UNIX systems. Some products let you broadcast faxes, whereas others let you mail-merge faxes. Ultimately, choosing a fax server for a particular environment boils down to finding the product with the exact feature set you need.
For Exchange Server integration, Faxination is second to none. Fenestrae developed this product specifically to work within an Exchange Server environment, and Faxination is time-tested, having gone through several revisions. For Exchange Server-only shops or companies that use Exchange Server in conjunction with other services Faxination supports, the product is a good investment—if you can afford it.
If you need Web-client interoperability, consider Faxgate. This software has a powerful Web client that lets you send faxes and perform housekeeping functions such as maintaining a personal fax address book. Faxgate also lets you attach documents to a fax (like you can attach a document to an email message), so you can use the Web interface to fax a Microsoft Word document.
My favorite products are TOPCALL and RightFAX. TOPCALL's message server approach is a technologically savvy solution that lets the TOPCALL server's role grow as corporate communications grow. On the software-only side, I enjoyed working with RightFAX. The software's sophistication, modular components, and affordable price are attractive.
In my reviews of individual products, I provide each product's strengths and weaknesses. I don't discuss some features—such as call accounting, LCR, and load balancing—if the features performed as I expected and I found nothing exceptional to mention. In a few instances, if I found that a product lacks a common feature or has a unique or positive attribute, I share my discovery.
FaxFacts
If you need a fax server product with fax broadcasting, fax-on-demand, and mail-merge capabilities, the FaxFacts server is ideal. FaxFacts has the features to create a comprehensive production fax server for your business.
Copia's automated installation program makes installation a breeze. The program walks you through three steps: creating the installation directory; using the FaxFacts Configurator, which Screen 1 shows, to select options to install; and performing the installation. After installation completes, the product is ready to use.
Copia's approach to centralized fax resource management is unique. Rather than using a client application to connect to the fax server and modify operational parameters, you use a series of configuration files on the server. To change the server's operation, you connect to the server and edit the appropriate file. The benefit of this approach is that you can connect to the server from your laptop without any special client software—a real plus in a large corporate environment if you need to make a quick adjustment when you're away from your workstation.
The only difficulty with this approach is figuring out the command language. For example, I wanted to test sending faxes from my SCO UNIX host. With FaxFacts, you create a fax-to-send file that contains a series of commands that tell the server how to process the fax. The product includes documentation, but the reference manual is difficult to understand and doesn't provide examples of how to use the commands, so creating the command file took longer than I expected.
One FaxFacts feature I found useful is automatic server load balancing. Some of the other products require you to configure load balancing manually (e.g., define master and slave servers and tell the product how to perform load balancing when usage exceeds a certain threshold). With FaxFacts, you merely update the configuration files to include additional servers. The product treats all lines across all fax servers as one large fax server and automatically uses the first open line to send faxes, regardless of which server the line is attached to.
How many times have you had a long fax abort halfway through and had to start over at the beginning to send the fax? FaxFacts' Intelligent Retry feature eliminates that inconvenience and can save money if you routinely send faxes to locations with poor-quality phone lines. Intelligent retry lets you configure as many as eight retry strategies for the software to use to respond to a fax failure. For example, I created a default retry strategy that resends a failed fax's unsent pages.
FaxFacts' price is inexpensive, and the product's pricing structure is simple. A two-tiered pricing structure charges per line on the server and per client for each seat on the network. The Fax Mail component, which routes faxes to users' email inboxes, adds $185 per line.