How to Route Inbound Faxes

The Impact Fax Server is compatible with several inbound routing methodologies.

1.Using Direct Inward Dialing (DID) line. Everybody in the organization has his own unique fax number. For example, John Smith’s fax number is 555-4001; Bob Jones’s fax number is 555-4002, etc…

Advantage: Easy to set up. It is very common in North America. Disadvantage: Expensive solution because it is requires DID line and DID fax boards.

2) Using DTMF to give a unique fax extension for each client. For example John Smith’s fax number is 555-4119 x 2749.

Advantage: Easy to set up. It is very common around the world.
Disadvantage: Sender must know the extension. Can be difficult to use with fax broadcasting. Also it poses a problem with unattended faxes.

3) Using Subaddressing to route inbound fax. The fundamental problem with this technology is that the sender must know the destination subaddress and the sender’s machine has to be able send subaddress.

Advantage: NONE! NOT Recommended.
Disadvantage: Sender is responsible for the receivers inbound routing. It is scarcely used.

4) Use auto-print. All incoming faxes are printed and manually delivered as mail. This is very common with organizations where the fax server is located in the mailroom and all incoming faxes are delivered with the mail.

Advantage: Simple to use.
Disadvantage: Faxes can be lost and timing of delivery is unreliable. Fax confidentiality is lost

5) Use shared mailbox. All incoming faxes are placed in a shared mailbox and several secretaries or clerks manually route the faxes to individuals. This approach is very common.

Advantage: Simple to use.
Disadvantage: Fax confidentiality is lost.

Why use Fax/Voice C++/OCX

Black Ice Software is the only company who offers Open Architecture and Open API for all of the leading fax and voice hardware on the market and it is royalty free.

Why should your software support more than one hardware manufacturer?

In the beginning of the Computer Telephony industry it was an advantage to make strategic alliances with hardware manufacturer’s in order to leverage the newest technology and to combine marketing resources. Today almost all of the Fax Server and Voice Mail Server companies are using several hardware manufacturers to satisfy their customer’s diverse demands for new technologies. The CT market is evolving so rapidly that not one-hardware manufacturer can keep up with the demand for technology. Our open fax architecture and single API for the leading fax boards gives developers the ability to use standard based building blocks to create complex applications. By providing more flexibility, the developer is able to render innovative communication systems and reach a wider audience. A unified messaging scalable system requirement further complicates the picture. Consider a typical corporate customer: He already has an out dated fax server and wants to upgrade to newer technology. He’d like to keep his old hardware since he paid a lot for it a few years ago. He may start out with a pilot fax server system of 4 ports (using old hardware) but wants to go up to 36 or 48 ports and wants to add voice mail at a later time (getting some new hardware). In addition he wants to do a large volume of fax broadcasting once a week sharing fax and voice resources. A similar scenario: the customer is already sold on the hardware and shopping for a software solution but insists on using one hardware vendor for faxing and another for voice mail. In both situations, unless your fax or voice mail server supports a variety of hardware you’ve lost the sale.