I have a new client for whom I’m developing a call-center solution.
For the short term, leads gathered by the call center will be faxed to branches for followup. The call center takes in about 2000 leads a month.
The client does not want the CSR to have to send a fax each time a lead comes in, or even have to print the lead out in the first place, considering the waste of time, paper, etc.
Is there a plugin that will send faxes directly from the Servoy Server?
Barring that, does anyone have an elegant solution for this business requirement? The client is running Gentoo Linux on the Servoy server, but also has a Wintel server that could be used as a fax server if necessary. The client also has a multifunction networked printer, but the fax capability is standalone. Is there another multifunction that would allow ‘printing’ straight out to a fax number?
I’m researching furiously, since the client really wants this in the first release, but if someone could lend their experience and just point me in the right direction, whatever that may be, I’d sure appreciate it!
There are a quite few options: specialised fax software, fax gateways, special hardware, web services, fax beans, etc.
Probably the easiest is an email to fax service. I found one at: http://www.interfax.net
They offer a free developer account.
You can email plain text but also a pdf. Create a pdf in Servoy and email it to the service.
For example to email the current record of the current form you can use the following method:
//print the current form as pdf into a variable
var success = plugins.pdf_output.startMetaPrintJob()
if (success)
{
controller.print(true,false,plugins.pdf_output.getPDFPrinter());
}
var thePdf = plugins.pdf_output.endMetaPrintJob()
//email it to the fax service
var attachment1 = plugins.mail.createBinaryAttachment('fax.pdf',thePdf);
var succes = plugins.mail.sendMail('+31842242422@fax.tc', 'jaleman@servoy.com', "Here's a fax", '',null,null,new Array(attachment1));
if (!succes)
{
plugins.dialogs.showWarningDialog('Alert','Failed to send fax','OK');
}
Replace +31842242422 with the fax number you want to fax to.
Replace jaleman@servoy.com with the email that is registered with interfax.
Isn’t Servoy amazing? You can implement faxing in your solution in less than 5 minutes!
NOTE: This tip uses the Pdf printer plugin by Rumora, if you don’t have it yet you can download it here: http://forum.servoy.com/download.php?id=383
(the link above will only work if you are logged in to the forum)
The services provided by companies such as interfax.net seem pretty cool.
I had a few scenarios in mind when I started considering the integration of fax functionality onto my beans & plugins - specifically the new OLE bean.
But, as I thought it through, I came up with the following fundamental question:
Would anyone prefer to have a full faxing integration onto a bean/plugin instead of the email technique posted earlier ?
Personally, I would be more than happy to export to file and then create an email message.
However, some people may prefer a full integration where email is not used as the sending mechanism (but rather is used only for confirmation or failure).
If anyboy would be interested in such an integration, please reply here.
If we did do an integration, we would use the interfax web-service api.
Of course, the key non-technical issue then becomes the security aspect(s) of the customer providing their account credentials.
I have posted this message because we had a scenario where, within a found set, every document (of the various mime-types supported by the bean/plugin) needed to be faxed off.
We at InterFAX will be happy to work with any developer interested in developing a connector between our service and Servoy. Note that it is not compulsory to use our email-to-fax interface. Rather, an XML Web Service-based interface would be more natural, if supported by Servoy.
You’re invited to register with our free developer program, which will give you access to our Fax API and will let you send as many faxes as you need to one fax number you designate upon registration.
We’re also happy to answer any questions on our developer forum.