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Automate faxing 100's of docs?

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    Automate faxing 100's of docs?

    I have a customer who wants to know about sending 100's (maybe 1000+) faxes using phone numbers in the database.

    Does anyone know if there is a reasonable way to do this or is it easier to just use one of the commercial programs and re-type (import?) the phone numbers?

    #2
    RE: Automate faxing 100's of docs?

    Cal, I have limited experience helping a user do exactly this with Alpha Five. We've wound up using faxlist tables that are simply DBF files I create at print time, containing the latest recipient names and fax numbers. Then a commercial faxing program picks up the dbf file and either treats it as a phone book, or imports it into an existing phone book...


    A primary consideration is the size of the pipe you're using to send out the faxes. If the user wants to use a single phone line, and each fax takes 1 minute to dial, connect, send, and disconnect consider how long a typical 'batch' will take. (Six hundred faxes would take 10 hours, assuming no lost time for disconnects, busy signals, re-dials...)


    My client had best luck using a multi-line fax board, connected to multiple phone lines. Some of these seem to require particular faxing software...


    Knowing what I know now, I'd start with the hardware... find the board that will do the job you need, and then find out what software it uses... and then finally find out what format it needs the faxlists to be in... Make sense?


    -- tom

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      #3
      RE: Automate faxing 100's of docs?

      Thanks Tom.

      I had a feeling it would be silly to try to get A5 to send the faxes directly but thought I'd ask. After all, it's always possible someone else might know something I don't - although it surprises me when it happens. (Oddly enough, it never seems to surprise anybody else - esp. my wife!)

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        #4
        RE: Automate faxing 100's of docs?

        I run about 100 faxes at a time once a month as a dinner meeting notice to an Association membership. I looked at some online options like efax.com. In emailing with them their tech support indicated a max load of about 50 faxes at a time. Cost was probably comparable. While 50 is a far cry from 1000 maybe there are some online options. What especially appealed to me was I could send it once, they took over, freeing my phone line and fax immediately for fax back replies...

        But I ended up with Talkworks Pro from Symantec and a fax modem. It works, but it takes hours....Better than hand feeding them, though!

        Steve Williams

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          #5
          RE: Automate faxing 100's of docs?

          Cal
          Selwyn said at the conference that Ver 5 will have faxing capabilities a few months after it is released.
          For now we use Lansource Faxport (now 3 com)as a network fax server and a rocketport board (good value) running USR courier's for modems. Faxport was at the time reasonably priced and allows all network users to fax over fax server. It also allows us to do bulk faxes and a lot of other things. We create the phone books using ODBC even though the phone books are natively in DBF format as we haven't had much luck (or tried much) to read A4/A5 dbf's directly. This has worked pretty well for us and is currently very stable. I haven't rebooted it in a month or two.

          Russ

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