Fax to email workaround

[drumster34]

Hi All,

I recently upgraded our in-house CS5000 to 6.0 and office-spaced our clunky EM box. Now that we are using Unified Messaging and embedded voice mail we no longer have the ability to send incoming faxes to email accounts. This is not life or death but we do get a lot of garbage faxes and the ability to review them before printing and wasting paper resources is really nice. Does anyone know of a workaround for this or a way that it can be done with our current set up?
Much appreciation in advance!

[akuhn]

Not a workaround, but our vendor brought in the MultiTech fax server to replace all of that.  The interaction between the Multitech and the 5000 is a little kludgy, but it works.

[Tech Electronics]

Drumster34,

The MultiTech Fax Finder is a good solution for this and I think a lot of vendors use it as it is easy to set up and works well with the 5000. There are a few things that are needed for this solution to work and if you know them up front then it won't be a surprise later on. I am not sure what Akuhn is referring to as kludgy, but it may be how there solution is implemented.

1. The MultiTech Fax Finder comes in multiple ports with the least being 2. You will need to fill in all the ports for the solution to work smoothly, hence you will need that many analog ports available in your Mitel 5000 to support it.

2. An Analog Voice Mail License will need to be purchased for the Mitel 5000 in order to create a Analog Voice Mail Hunt Group to house the analog ports to send faxes to the Fax Finder.

3. The MultiTech is not truly integrated into the 5000 so you need to program in both devices unlike with the EM solution. The 5000 will house the Phantom Extension that provide the DTMF digits to the Fax Finder when a call is transferred and the Fax Finder needs to have its User's and Inbound Routes programmed to route and email faxes.

There are a few more gotcha's with the programming of the 5000 and the Fax Finder, but for the most part your vendor should know what these are and if they don't you can post questions here on the forums and I or one of the other knowledgeable technicians will be more than happy to help you out.

Thanks,

TE

[drumster34]

Thanks TE and akuhn! I appreciate the quick response. I was hoping to not spend any more coin but it looks like I might have to bite the bullet.
I originally proposed the upgrade because of the footprint of the EM box and its unneeded power consumption, not looking forward to the response of my CEO when I tell him we gotta spend more money

[akuhn]

#3 is the Kludgy part.  To track down who has what, you usually need to look at both the MultiTech fax interface AND the 5000 DB Admin Interface.  And the way it's setup on our system, it's that part of the 5000 DB interface that's not sortable, so scrolling and looking is the only way.

By "not integrated" with each other, it's truly not integrated.  But once it's set, it's set.

[Tech Electronics]

Akuhn,

I am not sure what you mean by not sortable, but you can click on the column header and sort according to that. Also if you know the extension number you just need to type that in to see if it is there or not. We normally try to set the extension number of the phantom to be the same as the last 4-digits of the DID to make it easier to track as well, but sometimes that is not an option so you make sure to put it in either the description or the username in order to sort and find it faster.

Thanks,

TE