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
