Fax Integration for Microsoft SharePoint
Send and receive faxes from SharePoint document libraries
- Receive faxes to document libraries as searchable PDF files
- Send faxes from document libraries and automated workflows
- Configure fax capabilities of each SharePoint site individually
Biscom's FAXCOM® fax server and Hosted Fax Service integrate with Microsoft SharePoint to provide efficient inbound routing of faxed documents into SharePoint sites, complete with content filtering, metadata tags, and OCR to facilitate user searches. The integration is directly with SharePoint and eliminates the spam and security risks associated with enabling SharePoint sites for email access.
Key Benefits of Biscom’s Enterprise Fax for SharePoint
- Improve employee productivity by automating paper-intensive business processes
Biscom’s Enterprise Fax for SharePoint intelligently routes incoming faxes to SharePoint document libraries, enabling auto-population of fax content into library columns and triggering document processing workflows.
- Facilitate collaboration and communication with customers and business partners
With Biscom’s Enterprise Fax for SharePoint, automated business processes can aggregate SharePoint data and initiate outbound faxes to external parties for review or action.
- Let site administrators control all aspects of outbound faxing
Enterprise Fax for SharePoint enables site administrators to define document libraries that support outbound faxing and options available to senders, including: customizing fax cover page content, access to SharePoint contact lists, and permission to specify recipients not listed on contact lists.
- Support SharePoint as a Service Deployment
Recognizing the growing emphasis on cloud computing, Enterprise Fax for SharePoint seamlessly integrates fax capabilities regardless of whether SharePoint is installed on-premise or hosted by a SaaS or Cloud provider.
Key Features
Full Text Search
- Faxed documents can be found quickly whenever they are needed
- Incoming faxes are passed through an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process that creates background text that is indexed by SharePoint for full text searches
- The right documents go to the right places and junk is filtered out
- Inbound faxes are analyzed by a combination of fax transmission data and text from the OCR process to determine where documents go and how they should be tagged
- Manage document flows without software programming
- Authorized users can develop custom business rules that review fax transmission data and search for text within a document to make decisions on how to handle a document
- While email-enabling provides an easy way to route attachments into SharePoint, it exposes the site to filling up with spam and misplaced documents that an office worker then needs to sort out manually
- Tight integration between Advanced Fax Routing and SharePoint allows only rules-driven intelligently-filtered content to reach folders
- Manual steps are eliminated
- Inbound faxes can trigger automated SharePoint workflow processes to initiate action on documents
- Reduce time spent on manual data entry
- Fax transmission data (to, from, fax number, barcode data, etc.), as well as data extracted from the OCR process, can be automatically populated into column values in SharePoint lists
- Rights to view, modify, delete or download faxes can be managed
- An audit trail of changes is preserved within SharePoint
Product Capabilities
Integration with Microsoft SharePoint 2007
Microsoft SharePoint 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities for enterprise search, collaboration, content management, forms-driven business process facilitation, simplified information sharing, and enhanced business intelligence. Biscom’s document delivery solutions integrate with SharePoint to enable SharePoint to act upon delivered documents.
The following versions of Microsoft SharePoint are supported:
- Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
- SharePoint Portal Server 2003
- Microsoft SharePoint Online
FAXCOM Fax Server Solution
Received faxes are another form of “content” that can be delivered to and acted upon by SharePoint.
- Faxes arrive as TIFF images and are converted by FAXCOM Server to searchable PDF files
- Received faxes with searchable content are then delivered to SharePoint Document Libraries
- SharePoint indexes and stores received faxes and can also initiate a SharePoint workflow process
Advanced Fax Routing is a rules engine within FAXCOM Suite for Windows that can extract information from a fax and pass that information to SharePoint along with the original fax image. Capabilities include:
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Analyze known details of the fax and route accordingly
- DID of recipient, TSID, and Caller-ID of sender can be assigned to specific Document Libraries
- Date & time of fax determines destination – e.g., route to Document Library 1 during business hours and Document Library 2 after hours
- Determine appropriate Document Library by searching for key words or barcodes in the fax
- Split multi-page faxes for delivery to separate Document Libraries
- Extract additional information from a network database or other resource
- Use OCR and barcode results to query a network resource for additional data
- Automatically add column values to the received fax list item from the details of the fax transmission as well as the results of the OCR process and/or the barcode
- Column values are available immediately for use by SharePoint workflow processes to enable sorting, searching and organization of the received faxes
- Deliver faxes as searchable PDFs to appropriate Document Libraries
- Also deliver known details, OCR and barcode results, and results from network query as XML, CSV, etc.
- Capability to rename fax file
- Use SharePoint Site Aggregator to provide access to FAXCOM Web Client for users to send, receive, and track faxes
- Use SharePoint Site Aggregator to provide access to the Biscom Delivery Server site for users to send, receive, and track delivery of large files and secure messages
Extract additional details by OCR processing or barcode reading
Automatic Population of Column Values
Format and complete fax delivery
Additional SharePoint integrations
"We needed a system that would automatically send scheduling information to offline doctors via fax through our existing scheduling software. Biscom's hosted fax solution is simply more reliable. Installation was straightforward, using it is simple - our customers are happy and so are we."
