online fax services vs fax api

I'm building a communications app and we're looking at online fax services as well as the fax api in windows. Has anyone worked with either and if so, offer insights? I'm looking for a recommendation on a credible fax service.

Thanks,
JC

JC
Friday, April 23, 2004

Yes!

.
Friday, April 23, 2004

I've used both. For inbound fax, the J2 efax service is very decent but fairly expensive (once you're beyond about 300 faxes a month).

The Windows fax API is find for rinky dink faxing (<50 a day). Anything beyond that and not outsource, look at picking up a Brooktrout fax board. The sample source it comes with is more than enough to do large scale faxing.

Mark Smith
Friday, April 23, 2004

we used xpedite for a project (not one i worked on directly).

their sales team apparently claimed they had a nice web service style interface, when in fact they have some custom TCIP/IP interface with bad documentation. so it took some effort to actually get it up and running.

mb
Monday, April 26, 2004

Try the InterFAX fax Web Service at http://www.interfax.net/en/dev .  You can call the faxing methods with just a few lines of code from your .NET development environment.  There's a free developer program whose only limitation is that you're restricted to faxing to one pre-designated number.

By the way, there's a link to it from the CityDesk news page ( http://www.fogcreek.com/citydesk/news/index.html ), since the site was built with CityDesk.

Adam M
Sunday, May 16, 2004

When deciding on integrating faxing in a health care application, we compared the in house solution versus outsourced options. After careful consideration, we chose an outsourced fax provider because of the mission critical nature of our application and the fact that we did not want to invest in the faxing hardware infrastructure, telephone lines, modems etc. and also monitor it 24 hours a day. (Frankly, we didn't want to be paged in the middle of the night if the fax modems were stuck or the application to send out had crashed! Faxing is not our core competency.)

There are several providers who provide simple ways of integrating outbound faxing and they are almost equivalent in capabilities. We decided on Innoport because of their pricing and volume discounts (our volume is very high) and they provide a secure faxing API. Their solution took a few lines to integrate but we tested it for months before using it in production as we wanted to be sure of the reliability of the service. You can check them out at http://www.innoport.com

Jim Platt
Sunday, May 16, 2004

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