How CallPilot FAX Licensing Works

[smiley1570]

I've got a quick question about CallPilot Fax licensing and how it works.

OK, so we have a CS1000E R5.50 and a CallPilot 600r server R5.0. So we currently have 50 IP Phones with 50 Desktop Messaging licenses. So we were going to order 50 FAX licenses, when someone told me that the CallPilot server uses the licenses as a pool. So we would really only need about 10 FAX licenses for our 50 users, because chances are not all ten of them are going to FAX at once.

Is this the case? I was under the assumption we need licenses for how many IP phones we have, not how many concurrent faxes we think we'll send.

Could someone here please verify this?

Thanks for your time,
Jason

 

[tbonz25]

If you are using desktop faxing then yes you have to have 1 license for each user that will have faxing. This is set up in the mailbox class and is 1 license per user.

 

[smiley1570]

OK that's what I thought. It's a one for one license. So we have 50 IP phones, we'll need 50 FAX licenses.

Thanks

 

[allenmac]

The person who told you the fax licenses were used as a pool may have been confusing the licenses with fax channels.

Don't forget that you will need to buy some fax channels if you don't already have any, and for 50 users, depending on your fax usage, 10 would probably be overkill.

I have about 400 users on one of my CallPilot servers, and have 12 fax channels, and even that is overkill, we could probably get by with 6-8 fax channels.

 

[smiley1570]

Do you really need to buy fax channels? Per say? You just need to "configure", say 2 fax channels in the CS1000. Correct?

My assumption was the only thing that you really needed to purchase was the faxing keycodes.

Let me know,
Thanks,
Jason

 

[allenmac]

Nope,

You must have Fax channels on the CallPilot in order to process fax calls, and each fax channel requires 2 dsp units, so if you are using all of the dsp units on your current server, you will have to upgrade those as well.

There is really no such thing as a fax channel on the switch, you just setup another CDN on the CallPilot for multimedia messaging, and point your fax numbers to that number. That is what forces the call to use a fax channel instead of a voice channel (the voice channel will not be able to process the fax call).