The Wheel of Fortune – Undone at Last

Part I of this series covered that compliance not only meant complying with government regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, but also included the rules governing the integration of multiple Unified Communications (News - Alert) components.   Specifically, the article focused on VoIP, which is probably the most critical of all the UC components.   Integrating fax with Avaya and ShoreTel IP PBXs is critical for businesses using those products in order to complete the full UC series of solutions. 

Document management is another critical component that requires integration with imaging technologies from today’s leading vendors.   Certainly fax documents need to be handled in a manner conducive to efficient workflow, but so do hard-copy documents.   Fax is already in an image format, but hard-copy documents are not. These need to be converted to an electronic format to meet the requirements of regulations like HIPAA and Sarbox. Electronically formatted documents also facilitate easy access for authorized personnel, safe data backup and overall efficiency for the organization to better control costs. 

The imaging industry fully understands the advantage of imaging integration with UC and has conveniently provided APIs and SDKs to facilitate the process. Sharp was one of the first, introducing their Open System Architecture (OSA), of which version 4.0 was recently introduced.   Fuji-Xerox named their open architecture APEOS based on the Latin word aperire, meaning "to open" and the English acronym for Open System. The Xerox Corporation named their toolkit Extensible Interface Platform (EIP) and recently introduced version 2. Konica Minolta’s API is aptly named OpenAPI. eCopy (now owned by Nuance (News - Alert)) saw an opportunity a few years back and developed an integration SDK for Canon products and now supports devices from Ricoh, HP, Toshiba and others.  Therefore, there is a plethora of choices for the user, but the critical factor is to match your imaging device(s), such as an MFP, with UC components that support the proper SDK – sort of like going into a casino and spinning the Wheel of Fortune and hoping that the pointer falls on your number.

FaxCore (News - Alert) realized that customers do not like to gamble with their business solutions and decided to support as many imaging products as possible, supporting all of the above mentioned technologies, plus a few more. FaxCore’s overall objective is to provide the latest in fax server technology, but also to make things simple for our users and resellers. Of course, that means that when the “XYZ SDK” transitions to version 5 or the “ZXY SDK” transitions to version 4, FaxCore has to make changes to their solution to maintain compliance with the new versions. In other words, we have to maintain compliance with the products of our partners on an ongoing basis.

As stated in Part I of this series, FaxCore did not reinvent the wheel, but we have made sure it has all the required spokes and that it fits properly on the UC Wagon Wheel.