What is the best Windows based fax server that accepts PHP

April 26, 2007 10:34 AM

Looking for a new fax server. My company has a linux based fax server (Hilafax) that receives commands via php from our CRM that programs a URL into a standard web browser on our client machines containing the location of the document to fax and the fax number. We have over 100 stations and do a large amount of faxing. The Linux fax program is very unreliable.

I was looking for a windows based fax server that can accept the same kind of PHP commands and is windows user friendly. Also because of our large volume of faxing any program would have to be able to handle it. Any ideas?

posted by PreteFunkEra to Technology (3 answers total)

You might contact the folks over at http://4sightfax.com/. They are a small group but provide "hand holding" service.
posted by bkeene12 at 11:12 AM on April 26, 2007

Best answer: It might be a good idea to find out exactly why your current server is unreliable. Hylafax is actually pretty good, in my experience, if you have enough modems and telephone lines for the fax server. But any fax server is going to be unreliable if it is hardware bound, or is trying to send to call destinations that are troublesome due to line quality, or calling network issues. International faxing can also be a pain.

All that said, I've also worked with RightFax on Windows servers, and it's a decent commercial package, with thousands of volume client organizations.
posted by paulsc at 11:16 AM on April 26, 2007

I administer three RightFax servers for about 2600 users. They are indeed highly reliable (even considering they run on Windows servers), fairly easy to administer, and easy for the users as well. They do, however, use fax boards as output devices (T1 lines and DID numbers instead of individual fax lines), and these are not cheap. RightFax will deliver faxes to individual fax mailboxes on the server as well as to SMTP, Exchange and Notes clients (we use SMTP to deliver to Exchange, it works great and the connector doesn't cost extra), and allows print-to-fax from any Windows application.

(Not associated with Captaris, just a happily employed administrator).
posted by lhauser at 3:48 PM on April 26, 2007