Biscom's Fax Server and Hosted Fax Services for SharePoint is a new solution from Biscom that extends MS SharePoint document management and collaboration capabilities by receiving faxes to, and sending faxes from, SharePoint document libraries. Biscom's Fax Solution for SharePoint intelligently and automatically delivers incoming faxes without the need to email-enable the SharePoint site. 

Key features of Biscom's Fax Solution for SharePoint are:

• Auto-populating of document library column heading values
• Receiving of faxes as searchable PDF files
• Sending of outbound faxes from document libraries and automated workflows

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Despite the tough economic conditions, the latest report by Davidson Consulting, "Computer-Based Fax Markets, 2008-2013," shows that the fax server industry remains healthy.

The overall 2008 fax server market involved the sale of 8,950 fax server units, up 5.9% from 2007, generating flat total fax server revenues of $315.5 million. The increase in new fax server units was largely due to sales of FoIP units, while strong fax maintenance revenues increasing 16.2% from $102 million in 2007 to $118.5 million in 2008 ensured that 2008 total revenues increased during a very hard year.

This is a very good indicator for the fax server industry. It can create revenues from its installed base and rely less on new sales as a growth driver. Overall fax server sales are expected to grow from $315.5 million in 2008 to $495 million in 2013, a 9.4% compound annual growth rate.

For the fax server software itself, the factors that vendors need to watch are led by:

• Fax over IP servers, which grew 27.2% and is forecasted to grow from $76.2 million in 2008 to $450 million in 2013.
• VoIP service providers, who will turn to FoIP to T.38-enable the long-haul portions of their networks (SIP trunks) so they can solve the problem of many of their VoIP customers whose fax machines are "broken" by installing VoIP lines. Adding T.38 to their SIP trunks will allow those fax machines to fax over IP lines, which will allow the customers to place their entire voice and fax infrastructures on VoIP services.
• Multifunction peripherals (MFPs), whose support by fax servers will drive the second most growth in the market and which should account for more nearly one-half of total fax server revenues by the end of the forecast period.

Production fax, which is projected to grow at only a 7.5% rate during the forecast period to $105 million in 2013, but which will grow at a 121.5% CAGR in terms of FoIP installations to $80 million in 2013.

Peter Davidson, [http://www.davidsonconsulting.biz/] a fax industry analyst, heads up Davidson Consulting, which offers custom consulting in the area of facsimile.

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Implementing business rules to automate document routing to users and applications helps organizations improve such common business processes as mortgage application workflows, prescription fulfillment, and purchase order acknowledgement. Biscom's Advanced Fax Routing application can be used to route a fax in over 100 different ways. Just a few include:

• Redirect faxes when a recipient is out-of-office
• Deliver faxes to different locations based on the date-and-time
• Deliver the fax image along with additional extracted data in CSV or XML format
• Split a multi-page fax into multiple deliveries

To learn more about advanced fax routing for received faxes, scanned paper documents, and electronic files, join our upcoming Webcast.

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/138642936

I recently finished a course of fairly expensive medications for a condition I'm dealing with. The medication was quite expensive, but fortunately my insurance covered it. However, my insurance company would only cover the prescription if it was ordered from one particular pharmaceutical supplier. That's all fine with me and I was just happy to be able to get my medication when I needed it. Except, that's not what happened.

About once a month I'd go to see my doctor to get my condition checked on. If it persisted, he'd renew my prescription via fax and (in theory) the pharmaceutical supplier would call me to arrange for delivery. Well, that was the theory, anyway. I would sit in my doctor's office and watch him order my medication using an electronic medical record (EMR) solution. This meant that that the new prescription would be noted in my medical record and a fax would automatically be sent from the hospital's fax server to the pharmaceutical supplier. Often a 'fax received' confirmation would show up in my electronic medical record before I even left. It's a nice, secure, efficient solution: there's no paper generated, meticulous records are kept and my private healthcare information is never accessible by anyone other than my doctor and the pharmacist. The problems kicked in when I got in touch with the pharmaceutical supplier.

Notice that I said that I got in touch with them - they were actually supposed to call me within 24 hours. They never did. So I called them to arrange for the delivery of my medicine and I entered a strange world of inept bureaucracy and miscommunication. When I talked to the agents at the supplier's call center, they didn't have the information they needed to fulfill my order: the original prescription. The faxes came in to another department somewhere else (they could never tell me where) and the information was manually put into their system. Eventually. Most of the time if I called the next day they hadn't ‘received' the fax yet. The first time I heard this I couldn't believe my ears - I'd seen the fax confirmation of the original prescription order! But the call center agent didn't have the information because someone else hadn't ‘put it in the system.' No prescription, no medicine. I just had to wait - sometimes for several days.

Even when the order did come through to the call center, it was still clear that the agents weren't getting the information they needed to help me. I had a prescription for three different medications, but the agents usually only offered to send me one of them. It got to the point where I had to tell them to scroll down to their next screen to see the rest of my order - and I didn't even know what sort of application they were using! If I hadn't known exactly what medications I needed and in what dosages, I would have received incomplete orders almost every time. As it was, for well over a year I had to wait several days after my appointment, call the pharmaceutical supplier, tell THEM what they needed to send me and then wait even longer for the medicine. Needless to say, this didn't exactly speed my recovery.

So what went wrong? It wasn't the physician's fault - I'd seen him send the order myself and we got the confirmation it went through. It also wasn't the fault of the agent at the call center - they had a faulty system that didn't show them the information they needed. The problem was that this particular pharmaceutical supplier didn't have a simple way to move information from a fax to an electronic application quickly and reliably. What hurt me most wasn't the fact that I didn't get my medicine; it was the fact that my employer provides a solution tailor-made for just this sort of problem!

Biscom's Workflow solutions (Workflow Express and Workflow Enterprise Edition) were designed specifically to take electronic document images (faxes, PDF files, Word documents, etc.) and route them through a business workflow. In this case, a fax would come in and Workflow would automatically extract the identity of the patient and the ordering physician via OCR. By cross-referencing this with the pharmaceutical supplier's own database, the application could append a wealth of additional information (address, phone number, order history, etc.) and electronically submit the document to a pharmacist for review. The pharmacist could approve it with a single click and the system would automatically forward the order to an agent so they could call me and arrange for delivery. Best of all, at every stage in this process the user would be able at all times to view the original fax from my physician! Everything would have been tracked and audited. Everything would have been HIPAA-compliant. Everything would have been fast, simple, secure and not a single piece of paper would have been generated. If they'd had a Biscom Workflow solution. They didn't.

So, I spent several hours a month on the phone trying to get medication delivered on time and in the right amounts. I was sometimes successful; I always got it eventually and they only sent me the wrong amount once. Fortunately, my problem wasn't critical and I was smart enough to double-check the order each time. I shudder to think of the potential liability, however, should this company have sent the wrong dosage to someone who didn't know what they were supposed to be taking. Neither my physician nor I were very happy with the service we got from this pharmaceutical supplier and we got the impression that customer satisfaction wasn't a very high priority for them. I'd like to think that human life (or at very least the expense of a lawsuit) would be a bit more important.

What is it that they say about an ounce of prevention?

• Added capability to route to SharePoint document libraries.
• Added capability to use Advanced Fax Routing to auto-populate the document library column heading values when routing to SharePoint.
• Added capability to use Advanced Fax Routing to use data extracted from the fax image and fax transmission information as criteria for routing to SharePoint.
• Added new policy to specify use of the FAXCOM Viewer to view faxes received as PDF files.
• Added support for use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) for the SMTP Gateway.
• Added additional AD attributes to support the Biscom's hosted fax service.
• Added additional Transmit Options policy options: TSI and TX Header.
• Added Web Client support for Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome.

FAXCOM Suite for Windows is a Windows-based fax server solution that integrates natively with Active Directory and Active Directory Group Policy, and is managed via an MMC. FAXCOM Suite includes three fax applications and also supports Application Programming Interfaces.  

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With Biscom and VMware server consolidation, it's not a matter of whether you'll save money - it's a matter of when.

Consolidating your servers with VMware can save you some pretty dramatic numbers in IT costs. And when you consider that 100,000 VMware customers worldwide have a similar virtualization story to tell, it's downright amazing.

By leveraging VMware's virtualization technology; Biscom's Fax Server and FAXCOM Suite for Windows enables customers to lower capital and operational costs while providing an efficient and flexible faxing solution.

Save money. Save space. Reduce power and cooling costs. Learn more!

Chelmsford, MA - June 30th 2009 - Biscom, the most trusted name in enterprise fax servers, and secure file transfer solutions, today announced it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program. The VMware TAP program helps technology vendors integrate their products with VMware virtualization software and deliver timely, joint solutions to mutual customers.

As part of its Technology Alliance with VMware, Biscom has optimized all of its solutions for implementation in a VMware environment including its Faxcom Fax Servers, Faxcom Hosted Services, and Biscom Delivery Server, its secure file transfer solution.  Each solution has been extensively tested and benchmarked to ensure performance matches or exceeds a physical server.

"We are excited to welcome Biscom as the newest member of the VMware TAP program," said Bernie Mills, senior director, alliance programs, VMware. "The VMware TAP program offers companies like Biscom the tools and resources they need to develop high-value solutions that meet the needs of our mutual customers."

"Our goal has remained the same for 23 years - help customers move the data and documents that power their business as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible," said Don Dunning, CEO at Biscom, Inc.  "Today, that means our alliance with leaders in virtualization technologies such as VMware allow us to offer solutions that improve business continuity and reduce costs while delivering a smaller data center footprint with no reduction in scalability or performance."

In addition to integrating its fax and secure file transfer solutions with VMware virtualization software, Biscom has VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs) on staff to assist customers implementing these solutions into their VMware environments. In order to become a VCP, an individual must participate in a VMware authorized course, ensuring that Biscom has not only the solutions but also the expertise to help customers making the shift to virtual servers.

With more than 1,000 members worldwide, the VMware TAP program works with best-of-breed technology partners to provide them a comprehensive set of VMware technical and marketing services, support, tools and expertise to deliver enhanced value to joint customers.

 Managing high volumes of documents is a tedious and time consuming task. From the arcane processing of paper documents to the time-consuming management of electronic documents, companies are looking for ways to reduce costs and make employees more productive.

Biscom's Workflow Express can alleviate these headaches by simplifying and streamlining the processing of document images through a business workflow. In this one-hour Webinar, you will learn how your organization can store images in a searchable database so that they can be retrieved quickly and easily. We will discuss how real world customers have been able to:

- Improve productivity by up to 90%
- Improve scheduling efficiency
- Become a completely paperless department
- Reduce lead time on the processing of sales and purchase orders
- Improve the speed of retrieving critical time-sensitive information

The webinar will follow with a LIVE product demonstration of Biscom Workflow Express and a Q&A.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT

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Time is running out and the available slots for this week's webinar are almost gone. Don't miss this chance to register for our upcoming webinar while you still can:

How Enterprises Can Reduce Their Current Fax Costs By Up To 50%

Thursday, June 18, 2009 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT

 This webinar will present the advantages to an enterprise of evaluating available fax options, such as fax servers, MFP integration, hosted services and Fax over IP (FoIP). We will also outline which business applications are most appropriate for specific fax options and why you need to consider which applications require "convenience" faxing versus high volume "production" faxing.

With detailed analyses from Gartner, Davidson Consulting and other independent market analysts, this webinar will arm you with the facts you need to implement a fax solution that can reduce your current "cost per page" by up to 50%.

In this webinar, you will learn:

• How simplifying your fax setup can reduce your faxing costs by up to 50%
• How to analyze your fax operations, estimate your fax volume and define your fax strategy
• The difference between various fax technologies
• How to understand the cost implications of each option
• How to address regulatory requirements (HIPAA, SOX, etc.) and security needs
• How to guarantee business continuity in case of disaster by integrating multiple fax technologies and driving lower costs 

Don't miss this opportunity to learn more about how you can save money - register here!

Questions? Let me know at mtowler@biscom.com