crystalreporting
Instructor
Thought I'd let everyone know of a solution we've been working with to automatically fax Crystal reports. About two years ago we had a request from one of our clients to automate the faxing of the sales order acknowledgments. They would take approximately 150 orders per day, then print order acknowledgements (using Crystal) each night for that day's orders. A person would then spend the best part of the following day faxing these to their customers. We were able to assist somewhat by including the fax number on the acknowledgement, and by grouping the report by customer (some customers had multiple orders).
We looked at a number of 'fax server' products and eventually settled on FaxWare - a product developed by a New Zealand company ( - it is a low cost (under $400) fax server solution that runs as a service and polls a nominated folder for faxes to send out. We then utilized Ido Millet's brilliant Visual Cut application ( via the Windows scheduler to automatically group, burst and export RTF files to the FaxWare polling folder. FaxWare interprets the RTF files and looks for an imbedded fax number - it then strips it from the document and uses the number to dial and fax the document. You can include other information that FaxWare will recongize like customer number and name.
FaxWare has a log file and client application that lets you check to see which files sent OK and which files failed - you can choose to resend the failed ones - and the log includes any other imbedded info (customer number and name) so it's easy to review faxes that were sent months ago - you can even view and print the actual RTF document that was sent. FaxWare can be configured to retry faxes that fail multiple times at differing intervals, and it can even be set to purge it's own log files.
The reason I'm posting this now is that we've had a couple of clients using this product for years and it's extremely robust and reliable - with no maintenance once it's setup and configured. I just installed this solution again on another site last week, and it's working seamlessly again. It's great to have found an automated faxing solution that runs under $500 (including FaxWare and Visual Cut). I'll gladly provide more info. if anyone is interested.
Peter Shirley
We looked at a number of 'fax server' products and eventually settled on FaxWare - a product developed by a New Zealand company ( - it is a low cost (under $400) fax server solution that runs as a service and polls a nominated folder for faxes to send out. We then utilized Ido Millet's brilliant Visual Cut application ( via the Windows scheduler to automatically group, burst and export RTF files to the FaxWare polling folder. FaxWare interprets the RTF files and looks for an imbedded fax number - it then strips it from the document and uses the number to dial and fax the document. You can include other information that FaxWare will recongize like customer number and name.
FaxWare has a log file and client application that lets you check to see which files sent OK and which files failed - you can choose to resend the failed ones - and the log includes any other imbedded info (customer number and name) so it's easy to review faxes that were sent months ago - you can even view and print the actual RTF document that was sent. FaxWare can be configured to retry faxes that fail multiple times at differing intervals, and it can even be set to purge it's own log files.
The reason I'm posting this now is that we've had a couple of clients using this product for years and it's extremely robust and reliable - with no maintenance once it's setup and configured. I just installed this solution again on another site last week, and it's working seamlessly again. It's great to have found an automated faxing solution that runs under $500 (including FaxWare and Visual Cut). I'll gladly provide more info. if anyone is interested.
Peter Shirley
