Reviews

Enterprise Fax Servers Put An End To Watercooler Chats

To view the Report card.

To find out what fax server might be best-suited for the enterprise, we tested products from Biscom, The Bristol Group, Castelle, Copia International, Devcom Mid-America, Omtool, Optus Software, RightFAX, SoftLinx and TGI Technologies in our Syracuse University lab.

We focused on outbound faxing rather than inbound faxing because inbound faxing for the enterprise is fairly straightforward. Except in instances when you control the sender's fax process or you're using anything other than Direct Inward Dial (DID) for inbound routing, you'll be expending resources for someone to manually route faxes that are passed over by dual-tone, multiple fr equency (DTMF), optical character recognition (OCR) or other routing schemes. We were particularly int erested in how vendors implemented tiered management, client interaction and least-cost routing (see "Least-Cost Routing: Gossip Exposed" on page 124).

The most robust LCR configurations were offered by TGI Technologies' Enroute and Omtool's Fax Sr. Both provide an array of LCR configuration options with features such as on-the-fly phone number modification and fall-back fax sending. On the other end of the LCR spectrum, Optus Software's FACSys LCR is available only with its Exchange Connector, while Castelle and RightFAX don't offer any LCR functionality.

Scalability is difficult to judge. Fax solutions that split the server functions (including spooling, client interaction and file conversion) from I/O functions (modem sending and receiving)--such as TGI's Enroute or SoftLinx's Replix--tend to be more scalable. This is primarily because you can have fax servers in one geographic location and distribute the I/O servers across your LAN/WAN. Add load-balancing (moving outbound faxes from a busy server to a less busy one), and you'll maximize your installed I/O base.

Administrative tasks such as supervising users, managing the server and overseeing reporting abilities are important in a tiered-management scheme. Splitting management functions among administrators and users makes sense. Department managers have a better idea of who needs access to faxing, while network administrators need only concern themselves with keeping the system up and running.

Finally, we looked at faxing from applications and user interaction. Good desktop interaction is difficult to define, but we know it when we see it. Ease of client use is tantamount to a successful fax server implementation. Features such as real-time fax status feedback and automatic phone number formatting (depending on sending location) will mean less work for your users. If ease of use and solid feedback aren't in the package, users will be resistant to using the fax software. Omtool Fax Sr., RightFAX and SoftLinx's Replix offer excellent client fe edback mechanisms, including real-time status monitoring and queue monitoring, not unlike Microsoft's Print Manager.

The top products in the review provide reliable fax solutions that will minimize bottlenecks at the fax machine. TGI's Enroute edged out products from Omtool and Biscom because its architecture is the most flexible. You can have one fax server route faxes to many I/O devices, or many fax servers sending to one I/O device. In addition to being a strong fax server in general, Omtool's Fax Sr. has a great deal of flexibility in assigning access rights to users.

TGI Technologies Enroute 2.1B
Enroute version 2.1B is a versatile fax ser-ver solution that offers strong configuration utilities. The fax process is split among several daemons that run on the Unix operating system. The Queue Manager Daemon (QMD) manages the fax queue and communicates with clients. The Device Manager Daemon (DMD) manages fax trunks, or modems, and can be distributed with modems throughout an IP LAN/WAN. The System Log Daemon (SLD) manages the system logs for the QMD. There are other daemons, such as an authentication daemon, for remote clients, and an FTP daemon to transfer files to remote DMD not sharing a Network File System (NFS).

TGI's offering is very scalable, because the server subsystem is so modular. You have many options regarding where you can place the daemons. Only one QMD/SLD subsystem can run on a single host; however, multiple DMDs can run on a single host. You can centralize the server management by keeping the QMD/SLD local while distributing the DMD subsystem (modem pool) across your WAN to take advantage of LCR.

Smart-dial routing (SDR) works on simple pattern matching of phone numbers. By examining the phone number, the QMD determines which DMD gets the fax. It rebuilds the phone number, if necessary, for the destination and sends t he fax to the DMD for transmission over plain old telephone ser vice (POTS). Setting up the routing tables does take some insight and planning. You have to create a set of three map files that are read by the QMD at start-up.

Map 1 defines each trunk line that supports SDR, and maps country, area codes and prefixes to specific trunks. Map 2 creates the telephone number that is dialed at the destination DMD based on the trunk line defined in Map 1 and the correct matching of prefixes. Map 3 matches SDR trunks found in Map 1 to physical trunks on the DMDs. Map files 1 and 2 can be distributed globally to the outlying DMDs, while Map 3 is site-specific. Managing these map files gives you complete control over your LCR scheme, but it is difficult to implement and manage because a change in one file will have to be replicated to outlying sites.

Enroute's tiered-management system is closely tied to Unix security. Users who have Unix accounts can send and receive faxes from Enroute. Accounting is granted by being a member of the Unix Enroute group, which gives members ac cess to the accounting logs. Enroute administrators are either user Root or user Enroute. With this scheme, however, you can't grant access only to certain people without first setting up a special Unix server.