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By David Hafke
RightFAX NT 4.50 costs a pretty penny, but the return on your investment will be a powerful, flexible fax server.
Standalone fax solutions are common today. Networked fax sending is slowly catching up. Networked fax applications that send and receive, route and OCR are often difficult to manage and so are relatively rare.
RightFAX NT 4.50 is the first network fax application we've found that does the job for network administrators as well as users. Also available in Novell NetWare and IBM OS/2 Warp Server and LAN Server editions, it's everything you expect in a fax server. Its e-mail gateway can integrate RightFAX with Microsoft Mail, Microsoft Exchange, cc:Mail, Lotus Notes and GroupWise, so that your users' e-mail inbox contains faxes as well as messages. Or you can opt to use FaxUtil, RightFAX's own mailbox interface for users. The program includes a library for frequently sent documents and a shareable phone book for each networked user.
Price is the one fly in the ointment. RightFAX costs $1,495 for the first channel and $795 for each additional channel. The program itself takes up 80MB of disk space, but you'll need much more-the company recommends at least 540MB-to store images of sent and received faxes. I set up the program at WINDOWS Magazine's Labs using a Brooktrout TR114 multiport fax board on an AST Bravo Pentium Pro 150 with 32MB of RAM.
RightFAX sports an OCR engine; the OCR process takes place on the server, so it won't bog down the workstations.
When the server receives a fax, it routes it to a default fax queue. From there, the user can manually route the document to any other user on the network or externally to any other Group 3 fax device. The automatic inbound routing lets you choose from DID, DTMF, DNIS, OCR, channel or line, or manual routing. Using a DID trunk, you can assign a separate phone number to each fax queue. DTMF routes faxes based on numbers dialed after the connection is made. Using the OCR engine, RightFAX reads the first page of each incoming fax to determine the correct recipient. Line routing requires that each mailbox be associated with a certain line, so that documents can be sent to a mailbox based on the incoming line that was used.
The program lets you use embedded codes. These codes, when used with a word processor's mail-merge function, can broadcast documents to an unlimited number of users.
Two months-and several hundred faxes-after installation, RightFAX is still faxing merrily away and has required no maintenance or updates. Although expensive, RightFAX is worth considering, especially if you dread that walk to and from the fax machine.
--Info File--
RightFAX NT 4.50
Price: $1,495; each additional channel, $795
Pros: Versatility; power
Cons: Price
Disk Space: 80MB
RAM: 32MB
RightFAX
520-327-1357, fax 520-321-7456
WinMag Box Score 4.0
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