Linked by Keith Burgess on Mon 20th Jun 2005 17:48 UTC
Tired of getting up from your desk to fax a document? Have you ever wondered why your company's call center maintains wall-sized desks of fax machines? Employees at many large organizations are asking the same questions. Fortunately, so is Biscom, Inc. While there are a few companies providing enterprise fax solutions, Biscom, in this author's opinion, stands out as the market leader.
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Wow, you've gone all out with the integration. :-) I've seen this done on linux servers much more cleanly by integrating it with a Samba printer share and web interface. What you want to do is set up a Samba printer share (generic postscript) that will accept postscript documents, convert them into PDFs or a standard PS, and then store them in a directory somewhere. Then, set up a web interface in which users can view the contents of the directory, select a file, enter a fax number, and release it to hylafax (if you store them as PDF files, they can proof the document before releasing it). You'll need a little bit of programming on the web interface, but it's easy enough to do with PHP.
You missed my point or maybe I did not described well my problem (english is not my native language).
The problem is, that users would like to send a fax from within their current mailsystem/mail client. They want to just send the message to <123456789@fax.domain> (as example) and then just write some small stuff into the body and attach serval *.doc, *.xls and other files directly to the mail and then send that mail to the fax server.
Most comercial fax servers do automaticly detach the attachments and convert them to the fax specific image format and then the fax server sends the attachments as images to the recipient.
This is a very common functionality found in many fax servers.
I know that I can capture the output of a Samba shared virtual printer and then convert that to Postscript or TIFF and send that stuff over HylaFax. But tell me please how do you handle that inside a mail client? And tell me how do you send (with the print to Samba share solution) a fax wich has 1 cover sheet, 5 xls documents and 1 pdf? And all this in one run?
Another, easier method is to install a PDF printer (CutePDF or equivalent) on each machine and have the users generate a PDF which they can attach to an e-mail to send to the hylafax machine (or drop in a folder with the correct name - however you have it currently set up). This is much easier than supporting various windows-only file formats on a linux box. (I would consider running them through OpenOffice somehow before fiddling with WINE).
If you are using HylaFax, then you can many of the HylaFax clients ( http://www.hylafax.org/links.html ) and avoid using CutePDF or anything like this and still fax any document you can print (most of the clients install as printer driver doing the conversation automaticly for you and sending the data to the HylaFax server in the proper format).
Anyway, good luck.
Thanks