Faxing

[dstultz]

My manager mentioned to me some time back that ShoreTel is "missing the boat" on not offering/developing a faxing solution to go along with the ShoreTel system.

[cburgy]

Why exert the effort when there are great faxing solutions on the market already and you have the choice of implementing the one that best suits your needs?

[bclipp]

Originally Posted by cburgy

Why exert the effort when there are great faxing solutions on the market already and you have the choice of implementing the one that best suits your needs?

I happen to agree with you on this, too many good fax solutions exist. Stick to a limited product line and do it well. JMO

[dstultz]

Maybe money....Your 1 stop shop.

[cburgy]

Originally Posted by dstultz

Maybe money....Your 1 stop shop.

It wouldn't be free. The development time to add that functionality (or acquire someone who has it) would result in it being a chargable feature. At the end of the day, companies don't do things for free. Other systems "bake" it into the cost by charging an overall higher price and not giving you an option.


GFI Faxmaker is EXTREMELY reasonable. They are adding their own T.38 protocol in the next release so you won't have to buy a 3rd party one. This will continue to drive down the cost of implementing a solution.

[jingram]

I happen to agree with the original poster. While there are other great 3rd party products out there that work well with Shoretel, GFI being one of them, it would be nice to bake at least minimal fax "features" into the system. For example, I would LOVE to have been able to assign users two DID numbers. One for faxing and one for voice. The Fax DID simply points back to the Fax servers set up and passes the DTMF tones through. That would be an great little thing Shoretel could have added without driving up cost and without building a fax solution from scratch, yet at the same time it wouldn't drive up my licensing costs or force users to pick up there phone wait for the fax beeps, and then hang up if they want direct faxing on their own DID.

With GFI we have it actually looking at 13 DTMF tones and we have end users that want to direct fax give out the main fax number and their extension. However, we have ran into issues where clients on the other end have fax machines or servers that will not pass through all of those numbers so the fax ends up in lala land.

If you're reading this shoretel, multiple DIDs on one user account would be great, so I can assign one just for faxing.

[blanning]

Jingram the functionality of multiple DID's on a single extension as you call it is not what a DID is intended for, what you are looking to do should really be done by DNIS mapping (which will capture inbound DID's) and is possible with the ShoreTel solution as is.

[eazeaz]

we give each user two DID numbers (using DNIS for the 2nd). One for voice and one for faxing. The 3 digit prefix changes, but the last 4 are the same for each person. this makes remembering their numbers easier.

for example 123-555-1234 voice
123-666-1234 fax

[jingram]

You know, that is my bad. I didn't even think about DNIS mapping. I should probably explain. We were working on getting a built in fax server in a Canon830i working properly, but it didn't support DTMF, only CLSID, and we just couldn't get it to function properly. After switching to GFI we never revisited DNIS Mapping. It works great. Thanks for straightening me out.

Jack

[jbeaman]

Interactive Intelligence uses only 1 DID for both voice and fax. When a call is made to the user's DID callers hear a greeting stating the called parties name, then it says, "To connect directly to this party press the pound sign. To leave a voicemail, press 1." The whole time this message is playing the IPBX is listening for fax tones. If it hears them it receives the fax, and shows it in a fax tab in the user's PC client. This is a great feature, and something that I wish ShoreTel would implement.

JB