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[vtsmike]

I have searched the forum here, and it appears that there are others that are not totally satisfied with the solution offered by Sage in Paperless Office. Anyone that can share insight that could help those of us that are truly interested in running an efficient electronic delivery system would be appreciated.

** Winfax was not a true networkable product. However, for faxing customer invoices, it worked. Batch fax was great. 1 fax to send 20 invoices to 1 customer without a cover page. The only hitch was that we had to install Winfax on a workstation dedicated to this function, and run the print job from there - but it worked! and did so for over 8 years for us.

We finally upgraded to 4.3 from 4.1 recently, and found out the hard way that Paperless Office has no provision for batching the invoices from same customer to 1 fax. And the really ugly part, no provision for turning off the fax cover page. Did anyone at Sage think that customers (our customers) would appreciate getting 20 invoices faxed at the same time with 20 cover pages? Does Sage ask their customers for thoughts on things before they do it? We have customers that complained when they got 1 cover page for 1 invoice because it is a waste of paper, toner, and resources for something that gets tossed out, because the invoice itself contains all information to properly route it in most offices, especially the smaller ones.

** Did Sage not learn from Winfax that tying themselves to a single 3rd party source for a fax driver could cause problems down the road? I saw that someone here said that Paperless Office could work with other fax drivers. If so, which ones? How do you configure MAS90? It is very clear that only Microsoft Fax is supported by Sage. So, the answers to these questions could only come from this forum. I have GFI Faxmaker server. I have not experimented with Paperless Office, but when I do I will post results.

** Paperless office handles emailing of customer invoices fine. Our previous solution was a manual process. I am glad to see they use a 'built-in' process for email sending. They are not at the mercy of a 3rd party that they have no control over.

I have other thoughts on Purchase Orders, fax confirmations of success and failures, and more intelligence built in for quick and easy 1 click sending.

This is more of a venting than anything, and I apologize for that. It is frustrating to do these upgrades and then spend weeks picking up the pieces to get things working again.

-Mike

[mjpolk]

I use GFI Faxmaker when both emailing and faxing are required with Exchange Server.  It is a single routing solution. I'm not real familiar with paperless office since non of my clients use it.

The problem I've always had with 3rd party solutions for email and faxing is the addressing.  I usually end up replicating the Customer file to a public addressbook.

GFI has an API which will let you automate the sending and its fairly simple.

I have not automate any of this; but, I'm 80% sure it can be done.

Most of my clients just need emailing on an per order basis.  I use PDFCreator(Freeware) for them.

Faxmaker

http://www.gfi.com

PDFCreator

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

I wish I could be more help, but I'm still trying to find the time to get Sage Certified as a Consultant. So that I can know the Product better than I do.

[vtsmike]

First, Mike, GFI Faxmaker or any solution is probably single routing. MAS90 would have to send it the correct address/fax for each item in the 'batch'. Anyhow we ran our first week's invoices for customers. over 250, using Paperless Office. I must add the following statements to my original thoughts.

1) Fax coversheet on EACH invoice to the same customer is still wrong, BUT I added a blurb on the coverpage apologizing for this, and encouraged people to let us EMAIL instead. As a result we are getting more customers that will let us EMAIL to them instead of FAX.

2) The old Winfax solution we used, we would have to run another report (designed as a form) from custom reports that looked like the invoice we faxed, but had logic to print to the printer those that were NOT 'batch fax'. So - GOOD NEWS, in paperless office we can PRINT (the mailing copy), FAX, and EMAIL all at same time on 1 pass of the print routine. We like this feature very much.

3) There was no provision for EMAIL before. We had a 'work around' where we manually emailed invoices using the export button (never got around to using the cutePDF driver, or other solution to automate). Paperless Office handles EMAIL almost perfectly (see question below).

Is there a way to have 2 delivery messages? 1 for email and 1 for fax, without having to change at print time?

We are a lot happier than when we started, but I still have to get GFI Faxmaker set up so we can eliminate the huge waste of cover sheets. I will advise how things progress.

Thanks.

-Mike

[mjpolk]

GFI Fax Uses SMTP as its tranport. you email the fax to your email server and the email server routes the fax to GFI Fax. If you Configure it correctly.  Therefore the solution is Dual routing.

[vtsmike]

Mike, thanks for the explanation. I tried using the FaxMaker shared printer as the fax device for Mas90 and of course it did not like it. I am speaking for Paperless Office integration. Without modifying the existing invoice form in Crystal, is there a way to use the FaxMaker printer driver that is shared in Paperless Office?

I suspect I will have to do it this way (not through Paperless, but looking at the table for settings):

1) Modify my Crystal Invoice Form to look in AR_CustomerDocuments for the 'Fax' selection.

2) Send the properly constructed faxnumber<faxmakermailbox@faxmakerserver.com> (This may not be correct, I am playing from memory) for EACH unique invoice (bursting).

3) Print to the Faxmaker printer as a regular printer (not paperless).

-Mike

[mjpolk]

Actually, if your exchange server is configured right. you just email the fax in pdf format (Make sure the Fax server has Adobe reader installed). In simplified form, you would send the email as 9991234567@faxmaker.com the exchange server then routes the fax to Faxmaker server and faxmaker

sends the fax. You can also John.ABC.Smith.Sales.9991234567@faxmaker.com. this should allow you to do everything through Sage.

If you use the outlook client you have to manually address it and have all fax numbers in an address book.

[vtsmike]

It has been a while since I originally set all that up, and now it is coming back to me. It is reminding me of the bad memories before I automated it all.

We use the SMTP email-fax gateway with Faxmaker. Exchange Server is not required. But, yes if I go in and make all the email addresses from the fax number using Visual Integrator, then treating as an email with a PDF attachment through paperless office should work.

The only negative is that we are maintaining an email address that is a fax number, and is called an email in Paperless, and as long as only 1 or 2 people here maintain it, then things should stay in good condition.

The positive is that we can send fax invoices without a cover page on each invoice.

I will give it a whirl and post the results.

[vtsmike]

Success with Faxmaker.

In MAS90 paperless, added faxnumber<faxmailboxname@ourcompanyemailserver.com> as the email address for EMAIL delivery. It worked fine.

Thanks for your encouragement to move forward on that Mike.

-Mike