Re: FAXING Options

In a message dated 97-11-17 08:35:44 EST, jteff19@IDT.NET (Joe Teff) writes:

<< Quadrant's FastFax requires that you already have IBM's fax board plus
Facsimle Support/400. I am a user of the Quadrant product and a REAL BIG fan.
Although I only use the AS/400 resident piece, I've seen things in the
documentation concerning PCs and I believe that might be an answer to your
entire problem.>>

We have had FastFax for I think about 6-8 months.  It was fairly easy to set
up, and is easy enough for most users to use.  Up until recently the biggest
problem was a few bonehead users who would put any old phone number in their
fax phonebook without checking to see if it was still current.  FastFax would
try to send the fax, and when the other end was not answered by a fax, it
would keep trying until it had made 5 attempts and then error out.  We
finally got them straightened out.

Now, however we are running into another problem.  There are probably 20-30
people (it may be more, not really sure) in the office that are now using it
and it has started to become VERY slow.  Especially when it tries to send a
fax and the receiving end is busy.  The fax goes to the end of the fax queue
and its priority gets bumped to a higher(slower) priority.  Sometimes, this
happens several times before the fax is successfully sent.  People are
starting to complain that their faxes are taking 2-5 hours to get there
almost every day.  This is not good when the fax was a PO to order new stock
for the warehouse.

The other programmer who installed FastFax, and configured it says that he
was told by tech support that this is the way the program works, and it can't
be changed.  We really like FastFax, it is easy to use and works great,
except it has gotten so slow.  We are thinking that getting another FastFax
unit for a second phone line may help the problem.  If anyone knows of a
different solution to speed up FastFax, let me know.


TTFN...


John Baker, Field Systems Supervisor
SYSCO Food Services of Los Angeles
voice:  909-595-9595  ext 2555     fax:  909-594-8946
email:  baker.john.r045@sysco.com & jbakerfsa@aol.com - work
        jbakerii@aol.com - personal


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