Faxgate has been available for over a year, which makes it a veteran of the enterprise
faxing industry. We suppose that the product's abiding advantages, simplicity and
affordability, will continue to attract users, particularly in companies with nontechnical
employees, who would value ease of use. However, we wonder if future versions of Faxgate
will continue to emphasize the generic. That is, other faxing packages, including AVT's
RightFax and Copia's FaxFacts, seem to anticipate growing user sophistication. These
products seem more willing to challenge users. For example, these products offer more
elaborate phone book features than Faxgate.
But overall sophistication is, perhaps, a long-term issue. In the meantime, Faxgate has
more immediate challenges. The product needs to resolve a couple of bugs, which we found
relatively quickly in the tests we conducted. In addition, the product could benefit from
a little less emphasis on modularity, and a little more on cohesiveness. Specifically, the
product is, in essence, a collection of many small programs. Many of them accomplish
similar tasks, with respect to logging and queueing, for example.
Another indication that the modularity mindset may have been taken to an extreme
concerns the product's documentation. Faxgate is accompanied by many small, online
manuals. Our review of these manuals revealed redundancies and, even worse, instances in
which referencing information on a specific topic involved jumping from manual to manual.
INSTALLATION
Faxgate works with many computing environments, including SNA mainframes, AS/400s,
TCP/IP-based hosts, LANs, and Windows-based PCs. We limited our testing, however, to
running a turnkey system over Windows NT 4.0 Server. Our clients ran over Windows 95.
In the server portion of our installation, we installed a Brooktrout TR-114 dual-port
fax board and configured the system settings. Our main difficulty here was figuring out
how to insert the fax board: A metal bracket blocked the mounting screws and port brackets
on Teubner's Dell Optiplex server. The only way to access the available mounting slots was
to lift a white lever on the chassis' side, which in turn lifted an entire slot module out
of the computer's case.
Actually, this CompactPCI-like feature of the retail Dell Pentium has its advantages.
For example, it ensures that all slots are properly seated. All the same, we'd like to see
Teubner (or Dell) inscribe an icon or some kind of instruction close to the lever to
explain its operation.
Once we negotiated this snag, we cruised through the rest of the server setup. We were
particularly pleased with the graphical, auto-detecting version of Teubner's Brooktrout
setup program. In general, we prefer GUIs in place of DOS and Unix setups, and we're
usually optimistic about plug-and-play. We decided that the Brooktrout interface we used
in our installation was as close to plug-and-play as we could get on an NT 4.0 server. As
for the client software, we installed that with the help of a typical Windows wizard.
DOCUMENTATION
Faxgate's documentation is comprehensive, but it came entirely in Adobe Acrobat format. We
printed select segments of the several manuals, which include two parts of the massive
reference manual, an installation manual, a user's manual, and several smaller documents
devoted to configuring Faxgate with various e-mail packages.
We found that the information we needed was often scattered about the various
documents, particularly when we were trying to learn about e-mail integration. Several of
the manuals covered the same features, but we had to jump between these manuals to find
all of a given mail client's installation and setup information.
We understand why companies keep the users' manuals separate, but we'd like to see the
remaining installation and reference manuals combined into one book and restructured.
Ultimately, we think it would be helpful if printed versions of the documentation were
available.
FEATURES
Teubner claims that Faxgate's overall design, that is, its emphasis on modularity, is in
itself an important feature. This may be the case. Users, however, typically look for more
tangible features. Thus, users would be tend to be more appreciative of such features as
Faxgate's smooth integration with six major messaging programs, plus integration with
standard SMTP Internet mail. In addition, there are features for remote server management,
and several methods of logging inbound and outbound faxes. Faxgate also comes with a
PostScript/PCL converter, and fax messages can be stored in .tif and .ano formats.
Teubner's server is actually several programs in one. Icons lead to the individual fax
lines, a line converter, the print-to-fax driver, and receive/send to audit and database
files. There are also send scheduler and test fax icons. Users and permissions are
configured through the server as well. These options include "round robin
distribution" to user lists; multi-route distribution; rules faxing; attribute
distribution based on DID, DNIS, DTMF, and more; and remote routing tables.
We're much more pleased with Faxgate's client program than its server. The client wins
for simplicity, using only as many pull-down menus and buttons as are necessary to be
effective. We like the easy-to-use phone book feature, quick access to outgoing and
incoming log files, help with error codes, and a fax viewer/ cover page editor.
OPERATIONAL TESTING
Bugs emerged when we tried to print to the Faxgate driver from within Microsoft Word for
Windows 97. First, the Faxgate print driver conflicted with an older driver on our client
PC. No problem - we deleted the older driver, which solved the problem. Next, after
beginning the print-to-fax process, the client package would open automatically, but it
would not default to the "send" menu.
In other Microsoft Office applications and in programs like Netscape Navigator and
Adobe Photoshop, printing to Faxgate worked fine. We finally realized that the send menu
was opening fine, but for some reason, it opened behind the initial client window but left
no record of itself on the taskbar. We fixed this by accident. We had no idea that the
proper window was open at all until we happened to minimize the client and maximize it
again, which brought the active, "send" portion to the top.
The second bug was that regardless of which application we used to print to the Faxgate
driver, we received an "Unable to Insert Database Record" error message.
Something was locking this database and preventing the software from inserting a new file.
A Teubner technician found a fix. Faxgate's queue is designed to continue accepting new
records while the server may be offline, and the server itself continuously searches the
queue for records to fax. But there's also a secondary queue to help manage fax traffic,
in the form of a sub-directory of the main queue. The cause of our error message was that
we mistakenly configured our client to send its files to the initial queue.
You may well wonder how much traffic our lone client could have possibly caused. But
our test server was a lightning-fast Pentium 266, and it scoped the queue for new records
so often and so fast that it hogged the queue directory's managerial tasks. This gave us
the "Unable to Insert Database Record" error message.
After we dealt with these bugs, FaxGate worked fine. The detailed send menu and queue
manager kept us informed about individual faxes' status.
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
Although Faxgate's penchant for the generic in enterprise faxing can be construed as an
advantage, we would like the product to distinguish itself from the dozens of other
NT-based enterprise fax solutions on the market. It has potential, for example, to be the
enterprise leader in adjusting itself to merge with mail clients.
As mentioned, we dislike the purely online manuals, which are sometimes redundant and
which make it difficult to find specific pieces of information. Also, we still can't
figure out why Faxgate's client would work fine in Microsoft Word but not automatically
bring its send feature to the front.
CONCLUSION
What Faxgate needs to be a great solution is a little more cohesiveness and a sharper
focus. At present, the product seems too cumbersome and generic to be a standout. But
we're looking forward to seeing the next version. If your company has modest fax needs and
a modest budget, Faxgate could be the program for you: It's reliable, easy to learn and
use, and comes with excellent technical support. |
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