Process Incoming Fax

[aspectguy79]

I've never developed anything with Procomm/ASPECT. Could someone please advise me on what I need to accomplish:

1. Creating a Modem Bank
2. Connecting Modem Bank to PC/Windows XP
3. Answering All Incoming Faxes (ASCII)
4. Storing Incoming Faxes (ASCII) as text files in
directories labeled for each modem.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[knob]

I'm not terribly up on modem hardware nowadays, but you should be able to find a modem bank solution pretty easily. I would imagine most of the major modem manufacturers will have something that fits the bill. The only thing Procomm-wise to be aware of is that only modems up to COM9 are supported by default. There is a workaround that requires some updated files on my site to enable modems above COM9 to work in Procomm. This has been lightly-tested by a couple people, so it seems to work OK but would not be supported by Symantec if you ran into any problems.

Answering the incoming faxes shouldn't be a problem, but the sorting of the faxes will be a bit more difficult. You could use the $FAXSTATUS system variable to monitor the fax reception, similar to file transfers in Procomm, and $FAXFILE will get you the name of the fax file that is being sent. However, I'm not certain there is a way to get the name of the modem receiving the fax. $MODEMCONNECT may contain it or it may not, the help file doesn't really address fax operations very well.

You would also need to script the use of the OCR component of Procomm to change the faxes to the text format you wish.

http://www.aspectscripting.com

 

[aspectguy79]

Is there a way to just store incoming ascii as ascii? Essentially, it's just a data transfer text to text.

 

[knob]

The problem is that an incoming fax is really a graphics image (TIFF I think, or another common format) instead of just ASCII text, so you would need to use OCR to convert the fax into (hopefully) readable ASCII.

http://www.aspectscripting.com