Copia Does Fax Broadcasting better than anyone else.
To say that we do Fax Broadcasting better than anyone else is
a large boast. Then let me see if I can cover how Copia has been
inventive in solving the faxing problems that you can think of now
and the many other problems that you have not yet thought of. The
Copia FaxFacts product is about "no limits" faxing.
Copia's History in Fax
Copia was the first company to provide a Fax-On-Demand system
as a software product. Copia released FaxFacts in November 1989
at COMDEX in Las Vegas NV. Copia FaxFacts systems have been in continuous
operation since 1990.
Copia was the inventor of the same call Fax-On-Demand system, and
was granted a US patent for this invention. In 1990 the fax and
voice boards handled only a single line and we had to develop a
system that could share the load across multiple CPU's.
The early design decision enabled the fax load to be shared. This
early design has paid off for our fax broadcast systems, by allowing
very large systems to be installed.
Some of the questions you need to ask yourself in planning your
broadcast sytem are:
*** Is it scalable? ***
Can additional CPUs be added to deliver faxes and can additional
CPUs be added to help with the rasterization process, in features
such as mailmerge.
As we continued to work on the Fax-On-Demand system, we decided
to hand-off "faxback" requests into a general queue. This
queue was then processed by all the CPUs acting as "fax servers".
The queue is NOT a file, but a directory that we call "TOSEND".
One of the most important design specifications of the FaxFacts
system was to be an "open" system. When you create a queue
that is a file with records in the queue file, you now have to provide
an API to allow outside programs to send faxes. Each programming
language needs its own API.
Copia reviewed the work that was done by GammaLink on their Gammafax
product line. Copia supports the entire Dialogic/Gammafax productline
along with Brooktrout, and others. Terry Flanagan decided early
on to store the information needed to send fax in a normal ASCII
file. Using a file to store all the information that would normally
go into a "queue record" has many pluses and some negatives.
With an ASCII file per queue request, we have the ability to write
a request to send a fax from any programming languages. The essence
of the FaxFacts API is the following information written into a
file:
$fax_phone 630-778-8848
$fax_filename mytiff.tif
The above file is written to the tosend folder and given a unique
file name. The FaxFacts Engine controls the broadcast process in
each CPU that has fax boards in that CPU. The FaxFacts Engine looks
for files that are not claimed in the TOSEND folder. When the Engine
finds a file in the TOSEND folder that is unclaimed it starts to
send the file named in the file to the phone number specified. When
the fax is sent the file is then moved from the TOSEND folder and
placed into the SENT or FAIL folders. This has the advantage of
the TOSEND folder constantly being emptied by the Engine. The The
file stores additional information such as the failure code or the
CSID of the receiving fax machine. This additional information can
grow without the limits of field size that a queue record would
impose.
The design of our file-based queue also removed the need to have
to pack, compress, or run maintenance programs on the faxing system.
*** The system duty cycle should be 7 by 24 ***
This means that the system should not have files that grow and then
need to have programs run to "clean-up","remove gas","pack
deleted", or "make faster". Some systems can not
be run for days, week, or years with out having a person adjust
something. Copia has designed FaxFacts to run for years without
any "operator intervention"
Why Three kinds of fax broadcasting?
With FaxFacts, a broadcast can be one of three (3) ways. When you
send the same image to a list or group of people, we call that a
fax blast or simple fax broadcast. If you want to increase the reader
attention to the fax, you can do a Graphical Coversheet broadcast.
With the Graphical Coversheet broadcast you can place database field
anywhere on an image template (we call this a watermark). The result
is a fax that is sent with the basic message and the variable information
from your database overlaid onto the watermark. Each field can be
positioned size, font and angle can all be setup using the visual
fax viewer to design the final fax. If you need even more power
you can do a Mailmerge to fax using the FaxFacts FFMERGE system.
The Mailmerge system is unique to Copia in the way that we have
approached the problem, more later about FFMERGE.
Fax Blasting
While FaxFacts is a great Fax Blaster for people that have just
two phone lines, we are much better than the others when it comes
to larger numbers of faxes to send. Earlier I said that FaxFacts
is the "no limits" faxing systems. What that means is
that when you want to Blast Fax to 1,000, 10,000 or virtually unlimited
number of recipients.
*** When Blasting is there only one copy of the fax? ***
Many systems have to have a separate image for each person that
is going to receive a fax. This causes the system to have to create,
move and/or use more disk space for each fax receiver. With FaxFacts
each receiver gets a small file that contains the name of the fax
image to be sent. This saves time and space on the disk. Using the
FaxFacts Fax Blaster we can launch 100-150 faxes per second.
This means that you can launch 9000 fax blasting requests per minute!
This does not mean that you are sending 9000 faxes per minute, but
that you have queued 9000 fax requests. The launch speed only becomes
a problem if you can not launch faxes as fast as you can send them.
How many lines would I need to have sending faxes to keep up with
9000 faxes per min? If you figure 45 to 60 fax pages per hour. You
would have to have about 9000 phone lines to keep up with the launcher.
With "no limits" faxing, when you launch a blast fax you
are not limited by the file system as to how many faxes can be launched.
When you launch a blast fax under FaxFacts the only limit that can
be reached is when the "file server" is out of disk space.
Graphical Coversheet Broadcast
The next type of broadcast faxing is what we at Copia call Graphical
Coversheet broadcast. This type of blast fax is designed to increase
the readership of direct mail via fax. This is also called "junk
fax". It is only a "junk fax" if you are not interested
in the information in the fax.
People will read a fax that has their name on the fax. I think
that most of you have seen a direct mailing that had your name in
the body of the sales pitch. This same effect can be done with Copia's
Graphical Coversheet blast fax. We have had good luck placing the
name of the person we wish to read the fax on a 25-degree angle
in a script font. It says Steve, I thought you would be interested
in this info. This makes it look like some friend of mine saw the
information, wrote a note on it and faxed it to me. The chances
of me reading the fax are much greater when my name is written on
the fax.
There is a story on how the Graphical Coversheet product came to
life. In the Fax-On-Demand market one of our competitors had the
ability to construct a fax from data and images. This required programmer
like coding and was not visual. We needed to meet that requirement,
and we also wanted to improve the "look" of the coversheets
that were produced by the system.
The original coversheets available in most faxing systems, had
a logo followed by the ASCII font provided by the fax board supplier.
This font was UGLY. It also could not be compressed or any of the
other format options that users had become used to using in Windows.
The Graphical Coversheet program was a process that ran before the
fax was sent and the ASCII information as far as date, time, sender,
and memo information was overlaid onto a watermark logo sheet.
The Graphical Coversheet monitor ran on the server and produced
a temporary work file that included the watermark plus the variable
information to produce a pretty coversheet. After the Graphic Coversheet
system was working, our customers asked if we could do a blast fax
that used the graphical coversheet to increase the readership of
fax blasts. We said sure and we were well into "direct mail
via fax"
We have since added many features to the formatting capabilities
of the Graphical Coversheet system. We have customers that are actually
Using the system as a forms processing system. This is easy because
you have the ability to position any field on the watermark image
to within a 200th of an inch. Customers are using this to fax back
forms, invoices, and email to the closest fax machine.
[Graphical Coversheet]
Contact the Copia Sales department
for more information at 800.689.8898 or click
here to request a quote. |
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