Transparent routing
Least Cost Routing
Global Routing
Companies that send and receive a significant volume of faxes or
have multiple office locations may choose to deploy multiple fax servers on their
corporate network. This helps to minimise telephone charges for sending faxes, increase
the capacity of the fax infrastructure to send and receive more faxes and enhance the
reliability of the fax infrastructure.
Transparent routing
In order to realise these benefits, the fax server software used must implement fax
routing features – routing outbound faxes from one fax server to another within the
corporate network. This routing is achieved without the user being aware of it. Fax
confirmations are delivered in the normal way while behind the scenes the system
administrator can optimise fax deliveries. The concept of fax routing is simple. A user
creates a fax on his desktop computer and sends it to the fax server. A fax routing
program determines if it should send the fax or route it to another server to be sent from
there. The network may be a local area network, a corporate wide area network or the
public Internet. The key to successful and efficient fax routing is in configuring fax
servers to know when to route a fax from one server to another. Simple routing logic can
be defined in routing tables. More complex routing logic can be defined in routing
scripts, or even fully-fledged routing programs.
Least Cost Routing
Least Cost Routing provides a simple, efficient solution for a company to minimise
long-distance telephone charges from sending faxes. For example, if a company has offices
in London and New York, it can make significant savings by having the New York server send
faxes to US numbers, even though a fax may originate from someone in London. To set this
up, the system administrator configures the server to automatically route any fax to a
number beginning with 001 (the international code for the US) via the New York server. The
international code is automatically removed so the correct number can be dialled from New
York. This configuration is achieved using a simple table.
Global Routing
Large organisations require additional capabilities for routing faxes from one fax server
to another in their large, distributed networks. The table-based approach to routing often
does not meet the needs of these organisations as there are other factors to be considered
when determining the best route for sending a fax.
Global Routing provides these key features:
- Routes faxes based on a combination of fax attributes and local
server attributes
- Lets system managers control routing parameters
- Reacts to changes in network traffic on the LAN/WAN
- Links to commercial and Internet fax service providers for delivering
faxes
- Provides secondary methods for delivering a fax when the primary
method fails
The system administrator defines Global Routing scripts that specify
the conditions when a fax should be routed to and sent from a specific fax server. From
within the script, the administrator can evaluate virtually any property of an individual
fax, any of the company’s fax servers and the workload and availability of those fax
servers at a given time. This information enables the administrator to define the optimum
route for a fax under any set of circumstances. External fax services offer lower prices
for sending faxes internationally using their own private telecommunications network to
route the fax close to its final destination before sending the fax over a standard
telephone line from that point. Some Internet Service Providers have also begun to offer
fax services to their customers, providing lower rates for broadcasting a single fax
document to many recipients.
The intelligence of Global Routing is in the scripts that the system administrator defines
to determine when the system will use each routing option to deliver a fax. With
Omtool’s Fax Sr., Smart Scripts use a simple, natural language script that evaluates
the properties of the fax, the fax servers and the network and then specifies routing
instructions to follow based on these properties.
In some cases, to determine the optimum route for sending a fax, the administrator may
need to consider properties that are not accessible within the scripting language. By
allowing the administrator to develop a separate User Script using any common programming
language (C++, Visual Basic, Perl, etc…) and then link this program and its routing
logic into the Global Routing system, this provides the ultimate flexibility for managing
routing within the company’s fax server infrastructure.
