BladeWare Fax-to-Email for Windows

BladeWare™ Fax-to-Email for Windows (F2E) is a BladeWare application that receives incoming SIP-based fax calls, receives the fax, and e-mails the resulting file to the indicated subscriber using a built-in SMTP server. Fax2Email for Windows can be configured to receive calls directly and determine the subscriber information, as explained below.

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BladeWare is Commetrex’ host-media-processing telephony middleware, a value-adding platform licensed to telecom-equipment OEMs and system developers to enable IP-based network and enterprise voice and fax services. Fax2Email for Windows is a BladeWare client application that uses BladeWare’s Open Telecommunications Framework® (OTF) Kernel API to accept SIP calls and to receive faxes using Multi-Modal Terminating Fax (MMTF). MMTF terminates both T.38 Fax Relay and G.711 pass-through fax, the latter being required to interoperate with gateways that do not support T.38. The product also provides call detail and Web-based management interfaces.

BladeWare Fax2Email for Windows determines the identity of the recipient in one of two ways. It supports P-asserted identity. And it will retrieve user information from an internal flat file.

Unlike store-and-forward fax, using, for example, T.37, BladeWare terminates real-time IP fax transactions. Moreover, fax servers and services based on BladeWare need not sacrifice functionality when compared with PSTN-based fax servers. Instead, fax services based on BladeWare can extend coverage well beyond those offered by legacy systems.

Features

  • TerminatingT38
  • G.711 pass-through with Commetrex’ industry-leading analog modems
  • Commetrex’ T.30 Protocol
  • Subscriber database lookup
  • SMTP Support
  • Call Detail Records (CDR)
  • Host media processing
  • No specialized hardware required
  • SIP call control
  • Extensible client-server architecture
  • Web-based administration
  • Low power utilization
  • Small footprint

Benefits

  • Provides fax-to-email for Exchange 2010 users
  • Lowest cost
  • Ease of provisioning
  • Low operating cost
  • Developer control of system

Terminating IP Faxes

T.38 is an ITU protocol recommendation that an increasing number of TDM-IP gateways use to transport Group 3 faxes. T.38 removes these impairments often encountered when fax is treated as a voice call, while it lowers bandwidth requirements by a factor of 10-to-one.

The Fax-to-Email Application

At initialization time, a thread is started for each configured channel. When a call is received, the database lookup request is passed to the thread associated with the channel for processing. When the subscriber lookup completes, or the Exchange 2010 parameters decoded, the results are posted to the channel context and the result passed as an event to the application’s state machine.

The e-Mail package creates the e-mails and sends them to the specified SMTP server. The package includes a template-processing facility for formatting the e-mails. A single thread is used to send e-mails. A queue is maintained within the package of pending operations. If the e-mail is successfully sent, the fax file is deleted. If the e-mail fails, the fax file and a text version of the e-mail are written to a specified directory. In either case, a call-detail record (CDR) is written. The queue is maintained in memory, however a copy of each entry is saved in a specified directory. At startup, the e-mail package will reload all queue entries from the queue file and process them. This scheme allows recovery after system failure. The queue is checkpointed to disk after each modification.

The CDR package writes the call detail record for each completed call. It handles swapping and deleting out-of-date CDR files.

License Options

Commetrex offers software licenses designed to meet different needs. Typically, a user will license the BladeWare SDKs, which include an initial system, and then use per-system/per-port licenses for recurring systems. However, for those OEMs that intend to add significant value to the underlying BladeWare platform, Commetrex offers paid-up and royalty-based source-code licenses.

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