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	F E A T U R E

Coping with the Fax of Life October 4, 1999 By Mike Avery After testing fax server systems, our gut reaction to the subject is--enough! Sure, just about any of these systems will please your end users. Fax servers are very convenient, and most offices with more than a handful of employees should consider having one. The bad news is that dealing with the software may well drive a system manager to an early grave. As a rule, fax servers are a nuisance to set up, administer and change. It's the rare manual that offers much relief. Chalk up some of these woes to the multitude of duties fax servers perform; configuring them means dotting a lot of i's and crossing a lot of t's. At the very least, fax servers accept faxes, distribute them electronically and let users send faxes from their desktops. In addition, fax servers can offer the ability to handle mass faxing, fax-on-demand, fax-to-e-mail transfers, e-mail-to-fax transfers and Web access to faxes. We tested two classes of fax servers: turnkey solutions that include all the necessary hardware, and software-only packages. In the turnkey category, Biscom FaxCom 7000 for NT narrowly beat out Castelle FaxPress and Esker Faxgate to win our Editor's Choice award. Biscom FaxCom offers better expandability and functionality. Still, give credit to Castelle FaxPress; it is easy to install and offers end users a wide range of useful features for a much lower price. RightFax Enterprise Suite 6.0 took the Editor's Choice award in our software-only category with similar attributes to the turnkey leaders, with a high degree of expandability. Tobit FaxWare and Omtool Fax Sr. followed close behind, but the remainder of the field--Interstar Lightning Fax, Smith Micro Systems HotFax Share and GFI FaxMaker--managed only mediocre showings. Copia FaxFacts trailed the pack, hampered by poor e-mail integration and subpar functionality. Purchasing Considerations You need to consider overall cost and system integration when you compare turnkey fax servers with software-only packages. Most software-only vendors hint that you should install the software on its own machine. You also need to calculate the cost of a PC and fax boards to host the software. A VAR can integrate the system and install it for you, but if don't have one to provide this service, there's a lot to be said for looking at a turnkey solution. It's also important to consider a fax server's support for desktop and network operating systems. Most of these fax server packages are designed to work with Microsoft Windows NT-based networks. You can integrate them into a Novell NetWare-based network by loading a second client onto your desktop PCs. With Windows 95, 98 and NT this is less of a chore than it was with DOS or Windows 3.x, but many NetWare managers would still prefer not to do it. The exceptions to this rule are Tobit FaxWare software-only product, which bundles a NetWare and an NT version of its server, Castelle FaxPress and Biscom FaxCom, which uses an NLM on a NetWare server to send requests to the NT-based fax server. If you are in a NetWare-only environment and want to avoid complicating your workstations, these products are worth serious consideration. Biscom announced an NDS-enabled fax server at NetWorld+Interop in Atlanta last month. We tested all the fax servers on our 100BASE-T Ethernet LAN, running them under NT and NetWare, if possible. We installed client software on Windows 95 and NT PCs, sending faxes to PC-based fax modems. To test LCR (least cost routing), in the case of FaxCom, Faxgate and FaxWare, we used a machine at each vendor's site to run our tests over the Internet. For the other products, with the exception of FaxMaker and FaxFacts, we set up two fax servers at our site. For more on our test procedures, see "How We Tested Fax Servers," on page 94.
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