dricejb@drilex.UUCP (Craig Jackson drilex1) (12/21/90)
One of our users has the need for a FAX board, and he was wondering if
we could save money and go with a network FAX solution. What is the
state of FAX servers out there today? I remember hearing about
Castelle, and at least one other. I'd like to hear about both
dedicated boxes and software for dedicated or non-dedicated PCs.
--
Craig Jackson
dricejb@drilex.dri.mgh.com
{bbn,axiom,redsox,atexnet,ka3ovk}!drilex!{dricej,dricejb}kusumoto@chsun1.uchicago.edu (Bob Kusumoto) (12/22/90)
I know of three products and can tell you a bit about each of them:
1) Castelle Faxpress. This is a decent and proven way to go. It consists
of a box that sits on the network so you don't have to dedicate a machine
to it. They only offer the 4MB version now so it can handle more fonts.
I believe you can send ASCII, G3 Fax, and PCL files to it for faxing. It
costs a lot though, roughly $4k. Pretty good and stable from what I hear
though. If you want to add more lines, you have to buy more boxes, meaning
another $4k.
2) Gammalink Gammanet/Gammafax/GammaScript. We tried this route briefly.
It's the only one I know of that has a non-dedicated mode. Unfortunately,
in the non-dedicated mode, it can only handle ASCII conversions or G3 fax
formats. It does handles a wider variety of formats though, PCL and Epson,
among others, and with the GammaScript program, it also handles Postscript
and HP-GL conversions. We had problems getting the dedicated mode to work
over an Arcnet network (they claim to get it to work over ethernet), and
in dedicated mode, it's truely dedicated, forget trying to run some kind
of task switcher such as desqview. It loads way too many TSRs and the
Gammafax CP card that we used is pretty shaky without trying to work in
other programs. The good thing about this product is that they have
libraries available (costs a lot, $2.5k I think) so you can customize
the way you can fax. I hear IBM, DEC, and 3Com (or was it Baylan) that
provide customized fax programs that use the Gammalink hardware. But since
we couldn't get this thing to go, we returned it. If you do get this product
or the OAZ one, make sure you dedicate a powerful machine with lots of
memory for it. The more power and memory that the machine has to handle
the fax jobs, the better it will perform. The cost for a one card with
software was roughly $3k. Additional lines (up to 8 cards can be used on
a single FAX server) costs $800 to $1100 depending on which card was
purchased.
3) OAZ Fax Manager. I'm trying to get an eval for this. I saw demos and
was pretty impressed. It's a dedicated FAX server and it can handle up
to 4 cards (cost around $800 per card). The current cost of one card plus
software is roughly $3k. It handles conversion of ASCII, PCL, and one other
format (probably Epson or something popular like it), and the normal G3 Fax
format. Like the other products, it probably includes some way of handling
incoming faxes via mail. Like I said before, the more powerful and more
memory you give to the dedicated PC, the better the performance. Apart from
that, it's sounds good although I heard some horror stories about getting it
up and working, although I've equally heard some success stories about getting
it working so I'm going to try this before resorting to the Castelle product.
All fax products use TSRs on the workstation that pops up, asks for some
information for the optional cover page, and the fax number to call. They
usually capture the output sent to the printer port (I think WordPerfect
may have drivers for some fax boards now). Usually, incoming faxes are
handled by the designated fax administartor who takes a look at the fax
on a EGA/VGA monitor and emails it to whoever its suppose to go to or
have some method of giving a code or a trunk line number to route faxes
directly to the user via email. It basically comes down to what you get
for what you paid for and what features you deem more important than the
others. One thing I should add which I'm totally ignoring is cc:Mail's
fax option which costs $2k on top of cc:Mail's program, and requires the
cc:Mail gateway option ($1.3k if you don't already use it). It uses a PC
with some kind of fax board that's compatable with the Intel Connection
Co-processor card (I'm not sure which cards fall under that catagory,
I assume the newer SatiFAXtion card does, and Gammalink said their Gammafax
CP and XP cards did) work with it, although it's not as interesting in
a decent FAX server as I envisioned it to be. It might be worth a look
under the premise that you already have cc:Mail and cc:Mail gateway, but
it's not the best way to go if you don't have these products already.
I know there are other products out there but I don't think I looked at
them at all because they didn't seem to meet some requirements I had at
the time. Who knows?
I'll keep up guys up to date about our experiences with the OAZ fax manager
product when we get it up and running.
Bob
--
Bob Kusumoto | Find the electric messiah!
Internet: kusumoto@chsun1.uchicago.edu | The AC/DC God!
Bitnet: kusumoto@chsun1.uchicago.bitnet | - My Life with the Thrill Kill
UUCP: ...!{oddjob,gargoyle}!chsun1!kusumoto | Kult, "Kooler than Jesus"kenh@techbook.com (Ken Haynes) (12/22/90)
You're right Castelle makes a FAX server and I've heard it's pretty
good. If your clever, you can use anyones FAX card and Fresh Tech.
Modem assist to do a peer to peer connection from any workstation. It
eliminates the need for an expensive dedicated machine.
Ken
--
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UUCP: {nosun, sequent, tessi} kenh@techbookcraig@com50.c2s.mn.org (Craig Wilson) (12/22/90)
In article <kusumoto.661811332@chsun1> kusumoto@chsun1.uchicago.edu (Bob Kusumoto) writes: >I know of three products and can tell you a bit about each of them: >3) OAZ Fax Manager. I'm trying to get an eval for this. I saw demos and >was pretty impressed. It's a dedicated FAX server and it can handle up >to 4 cards (cost around $800 per card). The current cost of one card plus >software is roughly $3k. It handles conversion of ASCII, PCL, and one other >format (probably Epson or something popular like it), and the normal G3 Fax >format. Like the other products, it probably includes some way of handling >incoming faxes via mail. Like I said before, the more powerful and more >memory you give to the dedicated PC, the better the performance. Apart from >that, it's sounds good although I heard some horror stories about getting it >up and working, although I've equally heard some success stories about getting >it working so I'm going to try this before resorting to the Castelle product. I am not familiar with OAZ's network fax manager, but I am familiar with the OAZ cards and their software for running multiple cards in a machine. Both the hardware and the software work and are easily configured. We build our own multi-line fax servers (adding our own controlling software) from the OAZ components and it isn't too difficult to do. We have one installation receiving over 2100 fax messages a day. Anyway, I don't work for OAZ, but I wanted to put in a plug for them since they aren't mentioned too often on the net. I just use their products and am satisfied with them. /craig