Missing standard features and poor developments in IP Fax

[andreas.stumpf]

I've tested the ipfax a lot and came to the following results.

I hope someone of the developers reads this and becomes aware of what the market is used at the moment and what the market needs!

- usually when you send a fax between two physical fax devices, the sending fax device adds a header (with date, company, fax number, page and pagecount) to each page.

ip fax adds this headers only to the first page and only when coverpage is enabled on the router. all following pages gets no header.

this a a standard feature of a physical fax devices and also each fax server software is able to do this!

- it would also be nice to add the page number and the page count in the fax header (eg. page 1 of 10). Only possibe on the ipfax coverpage.htm

- When the fax coverpage with details is enabled on the router, the subject line is filled with two lines of hex numbers.

- sending a fax from outlook with a simple text message, generates three pages. page one from is the router's coverpage with header. second page is the coverpage from ipfax - also numberd as "Page 1 of 1". and the third page is the textfile MsgBody.txt also numberd as "Page 1".

In a few words: you send out fax with three pages, and each page is numbered as "page 1" (...in different styles...).

- Each subsriber has his own fax extension. during fax transmission the TSI and CSI values on the router are exchanged. the router commands (fax receive called-subscriber and fax send transmitting-subscriber) allow either a string or the $s$ (fax extension). but not both together.

usullay TSI and CSI is a combination of country code + area code + local number + fax extension (eg 0043-1-86694-103).

- Sending a fax from outlook is nice - but i need a (non)delivery report of the fax. the router is able to send this - but the reply comes allways to the fax outbound box and gets deleted. Is there a way to implement this?

overall this solution does not cover the "features" of a physical standard fax machine. which customer will use it?

Cisco sells UNITY as a unified communication platform. The voicemessaging is quite good - but a part of unified communication is FAX.

Cisco should invest a little bit more money in the fax development instead of creating tons of marketing slides for their sales force.

best regards

andreas

[Markus Schneider]

...just a few comments. First of all, keep in mind that this feature is the first release (in fact, officially it hasn't even been released).

- good suggestions on the cover pages. I'll try to take a look at that and try to see what can be done.

- what exactly is your point with TSI/CSI and the fax rec called-sub and fax send trans?

- we should be doing NDRs to the users. You need to have "mta receive generate permanent-error" configured on the router for this. With normal T.37, if there's a problem, such as busy, etc, the T37 gateway sends back an smtp message with a transient failure which is not sent back to the sender (the mail application itself has to deal with this). Since we didn't want people to have to fiddle with configuring exchange a great deal for this, the IOS command mentioned above replaces all of those messages with permanent failures so that it can receive them and read/interpret them. I'll need to do some checking, but at least that's how it's supposed to work.

[andreas.stumpf]

are there plans for an official release?

what features/enhancements do you plan in further releases and in what time frame?

lets say, this tool with some enhancements, would help us as a cisco partner in the competition against traditional pabx, against expensive third party products and in selling unity as unified messaging product. custs would also pay a little bit more for fax features!

CSI/TSI values should be a complete phone number which includes the individal extension.

In Active Directory or UnitySA I enter in the fax property field the individal extension for each user.

I tried "fax send transmitting-subscriber +43 1 86694" which worked. But in this case this does not include the extension.

I tried "fax send transmitting-subscriber $s$", but then the TSI is only the extension.

I tried "fax send transmitting-subscriber +43 1 86694 $s$" what generated an error message -> But this is what i need/want!

[lindborg]

Also, keep in mind, this IS A FREE FEATURE. You didn't pay a dime for it, it's a free download off my site and takes no license.

Keep that in mind as you're complaining about how it doesn't stack up against 3rd party fax servers (which you're free to buy - many work with Unity).

this was intended as a free low end fax service for small sites that didn't need a fully feature fax service. That's what it is. It's not at all meant to compete with fully featured fax products - keep in mind I have half of one guy working on this in the background - he's good but he can't compete with entire companies that do this for a living.

You can look at XMedius with support T.38 fax features if you want an IP fax solution that does more.

[travis-dennis_2]

I would rather have Jeff's half a guy and get this for free than pay for it. I have seen IP Fax developing over the last couple of years and with this latest incarnation am very satisfied. If you do a price vs. performance of IP Fax vs. any of the 3rd party tools it is my humble opinion that IP Fax wins hands down. Not trying to be a kiss-up to the Unity crew but sometimes complaints need to be tempered. The original poster raised valid points but I think they could have been voiced in a less confrontational manner given that this is a free add on. From what I can tell the Unity team has never hidden from any shortcomings that have been pointed out (and ALL programs have them) and have been pretty dang good about addressing them. Try getting the 3rd party companies to be that responsive. Just my 2 cents

[andreas.stumpf]

I understand that it is free and that you invested lots of time to get it working.

maybe there is some kind of difference between america and europe....

We offer customers powerfull faxserver when they need it. For simple sending/receiving faxes your tool would/will be the best.

But if you are not able to do the same as a physical fax device, then european customers would never use it - even if it is free. so whatfor did you develop this tool. for a small number of yuser that do not care what their fax is doing? How many of them do you have in america?

A simple header on each page can not be so difficult!? the printer driver you use for creating the tif images has the ability.

Just go into the driver's properties and enable the header page and configure the CSID Name and CSID Number parameter.

But you must do in your ipfax service (seems that you ignore the drivers default settings)

And if you do this, it would be very fine, when the CSID Number will be a combination of the subscriber's main number (eg +43-1-86694-) plus the individal fax ID (eg 103).

And when you send the mail to the router, you could also include the "new" CSID in the header. so i can use the $d$ variable for the tsi/csi commands and would transmit the right numbers.

What do you think about this? I think this seems not so difficult to adapt in you ipfax server?! And cust's would use it instead of dump it!

[lindborg]

Wow... you're a real motivator Andreas. I've got a lot of sites in the states using this, by the way - many of them who are providing feedback in a somewhat more positive manor than you are (i.e. asking for features but in a nice way).

You need to work a little on your pep talks. Try this - "I appreciate the work you put in on your own time to provide this great free functionality, but what would make it even better would be if you could provide the CSID Name and number on the outbound fax."

taking the approach of telling me it's easy and the tool is a useless pile of junk if I don't do this does not tend to motivate me greatly to stay up late working on this after hours. Just a little personal communication tip for you for the day.

[andreas.stumpf]

jeff, i sayed what i am missing and asked normal questions. also the second time i asked them in a polite way.

but in the past we had to tell cisco what european customers want (stupid things in ccm like callback, call queueing in hunt groups, ...)

and this was not easy and took four years since ccm 3.0.

there might also be different view between our cultures...

it seems that cisco (i mean those guys that have powerpoint instead of ios in the routers) is not motivation you enough....and i also did not do it.

If you read between the lines you were telling me things like "the tool is for free", "dont expect anything" and "we are not going to improve it". And this is not what i am looking for. so your answers were also not motivating and polite.

I did know that you and your half guy are developing it alone. i assumed a typical cisco business unit behind it

why cant you go to the cisco "powerpoint" unit and tell them that they can earn money if they include it in unity (not for free).

maybe you will get something you want? each european customer would pay more than a daim for it!

last lets say it in this way - honestly and only for you and your guy:

I like what you are doing and without this forum it would be very hard for me!

I adore your tool BUT please make it more usable for me (with a euopean flavour and for european customers).

cheers

andreas

[lindborg]

Just for the record, titling your post with "poor developments" is not nice, no matter how you slice it. You want to ask for features, ask for features. You'll notice I respond to those simple requests out here all the time. You want to make value judgements on my skill set, you'll get a poor reaction every time. Just so we're clear.

To follow up on this – we contacted the guys that make the print driver (it’s much more than a print to fax driver – they actually make a bunch of sales doing things like document archival for companies and such). Yes, there is a way we can have it add a line with the name/number/page count and such but, as with everything, it’s never as easy as it should be. This actually involves slamming things into the registry for each print job (i.e. if we want to include the sender’s fax extension onto the end of the number field) which, of course, means that other threads trying to use the print driver will use the same settings (i.e. their design assumes these values are all static). That’s not ideal but we can work around it. It also requires that we run stuff through the driver twice in the case of multiple documents being merged together or the page count stuff will potentially be off depending on where the page breaks are… again, not ideal but workable.

Here’s what we’ll do when Ken frees up: The fax wizard will get a new page where you can configure the company name (blank is ok) and the company phone number (again, blank is fine). There will also be a checkbox to turn this on/off. When a fax goes out if this is turned on, the name and number are slammed into the register for the print driver and we’ll set the flags to tell it to include the page count in the header. If we know the sending user is a subscriber we can find, we’ll fetch the FaxID field (which is not required so it may be NULL) and stick it onto the end of the number preceeded with a period (i.e. 206.255.4444.1234). The TIFF that gets sent to the gateway will be all ready to go with a cover page and each page will have this detail. As such you want to turn this off on the gateway or you’ll get some funny looking faxes going out…

Ken has a couple of critical items (conversation work, Permissions Wizard updates etc…) that can’t be put off due to schedule constraints. Once he’s done with those items, he’ll circle back around on this. I’ll post an update out here when it’s ready to go and has passed QA testing.

[lindborg]

Just in case you thought we forgot - version 2.0.22 of the IP Fax wizard was posted earlier today - it includes full support for the CSID functionality including page count and such. You'll find it on its home page here:

http://www.ciscounitytools.com/App_IPFaxConfigurationWizard.htm

the help file talks about how to configure the CSID information for the top of the fax pages.

You're welcome.

[andreas.stumpf]

Jeff, this is great!

Thanks a lot for improving this tool.

If I'm allowed, I would like to ask for some future feature enhancments:

- append the users fax extension to the CSID on the fax

- Deliver a success delivery message, when the fax was sent successfully

Thanks

Andreas

[lindborg]

Adding the extension of the user onto the CSID info should be pretty straight forward - the user may not necessarily have a fax extension and it may not be an extension if they do (i.e. it may be a 10 digit number for instance) so the logic will have to be a little more robust than just slapping what's in the FaxID field onto the line.

The delivery success would require updating the conversation to let the sender _ask_ for a success notification (i.e. ask for a delivery receipt) rather than always sending it - that'd get pretty obnoxious for folks that would rather only be notified of failures (which is most folks I think). This means we wont be able to just turn it on in the fax wizard itself, it'll require a conversation change. And/or giving a per user option to have delivery receipts for faxes always turned on (requires a DB change).

Either way, we're a little booked up at the moment with main line work so I wont have any cycles to burn on this for a while - but I'll put it on the list of stuff to do.

[Markus Schneider]

I've heard the delivery success notification requested before, too, and in both cases they didn't think it was a problem to get it for all sent faxes. The thinking was that when you send a fax, they're used to getting a confirmation sheet that it went through, so they would like to have something similar here. So if it would be just a global setting, then maybe it wouldn't be such a problem. Eventually it could be expanded to be on a per-request basis. Just a thought.

[andreas.stumpf]

I think that the success NDR issue should be a global parameter and not be a user based decission. so either a customer wants this notifications for all subscibers, or the customer does not want it.

Should also be easier to develop?!

Jeff, unfortunately I have found some issues with this release:

- fax header is in letter format (printer driver). we usually have A4 fax machines. so some part of the header are cut

- header page count is wrong. frist page (messagebody.txt) is numbered as page 1. the next page from an attached document is numbered as page 4. Page 2-3 numbers are missing.

- can you include in the header the page cound and the total page count? like 1/5, 2/5, ...

- when the message title is not exactly like [faxphone=] then the message is not sent and no feedback is provided to the user.

so when a fax was sent successfully the user gets no delivery notification AND when the fax was never send (due of a false message title) the user also gets not delivery notification. This will cause problems and confusions!!!

[lindborg]

We'll do the NDR work when cycles free up again (it wont be for another month at least).

The page count/header stuff is something we'll have to pass along to the print driver folks for comment - I'll make sure the QA guys look at A4 tests, I don't think anyone's done that in the lab thus far.