One of our Trading Partner is asking us to deliver Purchase Orders via Fax. Just wondering is there a way to send documents to a Fax Machine using webMethods ? Did any wmusers forum member implement such solution in the past? Will appreciate your input. Thanks!

Your best bet for doing this in Integration Server is to use the SMTP facilities to send the doc to a mail server (Exchange, Domino, etc.) or some other system which will do the faxing.

If your company has an enterprise fax solution such as RightFax (can’t remember who owns them these days) there may be an API that you could call from IS. You would define the form in the fax server’s development tools and then just call the service passing in the data. The fax software merges the data and the form and sends it to the recipient.

Most enterprise fax software solutions have an email gateway as Rob mentioned.

If your company doesn’t already have an enterprise fax solution, there are service bureaus who provide fax services. Those service bureaus usually have API’s that may even support web services these days.

Mark

Just pray that your purchasing dept is not going to ask you to automatically process faxed Invoice from Trading Partner! The non-technical types can be interesting sometimes…

Hi mcarlson,
Can u explain in little details how to use the right fax API and webMethods IS to send documents to fax server

It is possible use SMTP to send faxes from webMethods, but the challenge is getting status back and updating the original transaction.

A few months ago, we just completed a bi-directional fax gateway for a client using webMethods, RightFax and a product called TargetFax. It was some sort of order form. webMethods created the order form and gave it to us as a PDF fax attachment. webMethods also gave us an XML control file which contained the fax destination number, fax recipient, client # and a variety of data revelant to the project.

The TargetFax Server has an undocumented XML Gateway that can read XML, extract the data and convert it to whatever. In this case, it converted the XML data into a barcode, added it to the form and faxed it out. When the form came back in to the RightFax Server with the barcode, TargetFax read the barcode data, renamed the received fax and created a new XML file. Both the XML and received renamed fax were both sent back to webMethods.

I’ve been doing fax for more than 15 years. I’ve heard so many folks talking about the demise of fax, but for some reason it just won’t die…

Hi,
Thanks for the reply…By the way we did the a similar kind of thing but we only used right fax.

Excellent. Glad to here it worked out… Have a great weekend