Fax Virtualization Best Practices: What Everyone Wants to Know
Posted by
Biscom Inc on Wed, Jul 25, 2012 @ 12:01 PM
Biscom recently presented an information-packed webinar on fax virtualization best practices that resulted in record-breaking registrations and attendance rates for Biscom. Interest was also very high throughout the presentation and questions came flooding in during Q&A. The amount of interest motivated us to turn some of these questions into a blog post for our readers. Here are the top five questions asked during Q&A.
Would you like to ask us a question of your own? Use the comments feature and let us know what you would like to know about fax virtualization best practices.
How does the Biscom software work with cloud-based email or does it require in-house Exchange server?
Biscom’s software works with cloud-based email and it does not require in-house Exchange server. In order to fully utilize both inbound and outbound faxing from a hosted email provider such as Microsoft Exchange, you would need to publish that domain for outbound faxes. You would also need an M Ex record published externally so that when your users submit a fax to that domain, your hosted exchange environment will do a DNS lookup externally, resolve that and then send an SMTP message into your environment where the Suite for Windows would be running. For inbound faxing, that requirement would not be needed because all we would do is send SMTP messages as if it were any other SMTP sending to the hosted environment.
How would you integrate the use of multi function devices to the Biscom solution?
If it’s an email enabled device, you could simply be sending from the desktop by having the user send through the mail client or into the Biscom desktop client. Alternatively, it can also be sent directly to the faxing application, our SMTP gateway using the standard T.37 faxing protocol number@domain name. We also have direct integration with providers such as HP, Xerox, and Sharp and eCopy, which allow you to do a little bit more sophisticated integration with it then sending faxes out.
Can we have multiple SIP trunks to one FoIP virtual board?
You would need a SIP proxy between us and those devices or an SBC is advisable in order to provide better fail over. You might want to have multiple FOIP virtual servers so you have some redundancy as well as enhance that redundancy and remove any chance of failure.
Do you have design/config docs for Cisco CUCM integrations?
Dialogic has done a fantastic job of integrating and testing the product with many different FoIP switches and SIP trunk. As part of that process, they’ve developed a very good library of config docs from most, if not all of Cisco’s different configurations for T.38. Dialogic supports a lot of different environments and you can check the interruptibility list on their website.
I would like to hear more about the Biscom Hybrid set up: physical server at main site, but Biscom fax server for Disaster Recovery. How is that configured?
Faxcom Suite for Windows server, whether that’s running on your premise fax server or on its own server, can be configured once you have set up a hosted account with Biscom. You can configure it to connect into both or you can configure when that instance of Suite for Windows uploads outbound faxes. It can also be based on certain numbers dialed or a wait time in the queue . It can be set up just for disaster recovery, so when your queue can no longer connect to your local fax servers, it starts uploading jobs to the hosted servers. But in all cases, that queue would be connecting to the host and premise looking for inbound faxes, that way there’s nothing additional you need to configure.
