atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Mitel Telephones & Systems Can anyone suggest a FOIP solution to work with Mitel 3300

I just moved to a new company that has a Mitel infrastructure (I came from a company running Inter-Tel).
I'm still not 100% sure on our implementation but from what I know we have 3300 controllers in each of our 16 branches and PRIs going to our 3 larger back office locations. I am unsure if the PRIs connect to some other hardware or if they connect to the 3300s.

I am looking into implementing a FOIP solution. Right Fax came across my radar - are there any other solutions that work with the 3300s?

Eventually I'm looking to have faxes go to user's emails via DID and allow all users to fax from their desktop. Right now we just have office fax machines, and for 250 + people that isn't a great approach.

Our immediate however is only for 5 users, so if i could start with something small(and cheap) and be able to grow it later that would be ideal.

Thanks for any suggestions.
Andrew

Andrew, I am just a sales guy but I have heard nothing but horror stories with FOIP. I do have a couple other suggestions for you. One is if you have exchange 2010 UM you can add faxing capability to all your users at a lower rate than you SIP line through using the default service (concord technologies). The other is to use a service provider like concord technologies to do the faxing for you high uptime and none of the associated cost of a fax server.

If you wish to go down this road I would recommend that you keep a few PSTN fax lines for mission critical fax communications.

Thanks... Robert
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I don't know if you really mean FOIP or just some type of fax server that would send the received faxes out to email.

Faxing over ip should work as long as you have good qos and don't compress the call, there is also some new protcol for doing ip faxing that I haven't had the chance to read fully about.

If you are talking about a centrally located unit, and running all the DID's through that system, some type of analog or t1 connection should work fine.

As I don't know your trunking setup at all locations, and the volume of faxing your 250+ users produce, it's hard to say what I would do.

I do have one customer who installed a right fax server, and who they hired told me that it had to be a digital integation, since analog wasn't reliable. I told them if analog wasn't reliable, how has this old dos based voicemail been working for all these years.

I would take a look at the Multitech faxfinder as well as right fax.

Thanks for both of your responses!

I have done a little more research and found out that the Mitel 3300 system can have T.38 (The new fax standard for FOIP i believe Robert was referring to) channels added to it via licensing so that a fax server can communicate directly with it and access the PRI.

The server and the 3300 are in the same server room so latency shouldn't be a problem but we do have QoS working pretty well so i don't anticipate a problem.

We run Exchange 2007 and haven't tapped into the UM functionality but from what little I know about it i believe it isn't a direct replacement for a fax server at the current time, 2010 may have some improvements but i'm trying to keep this project within the scope.

My Mitel vendor suggested the Multitech faxfinder as well and though it would work now for the small group of users that have the immediate need i don't see it able to grow to meet our company wide needs of 250+ if we were to go full bore with this in the future.

IT seems as though Right Fax is very expensive as compared with other solutions, such as GFI Fax Maker whcih looks to be about 25% of the price of Right Fax. Anyone know why that may be and is it worth the money?

Any other suggestions?

THanks!

Yeah T38 is the only way to go for FoIP but... The latency and packet loss, a factor of the internet, as the faxes are transmitted. Think streaming media verses downloaded video. Also keep in mind that VOIP is still designated human voice not digital images. There are now gateways that claim to be smart FOIP but it really comes down to your VOIP provider and whether they support it in the future ... Especially considering how computation heavy fax is over VOIP hardware.

I would think investing in a Right Fax server in these days where faxing needs are decreasing and needs are becoming more sporadic would be an error. Dependent on your needs, I would certainly look into a hosted services as the TCO would be less and you would end up with a bullet proof system that offers full disaster recovery.

Oh and I believe 2007 UM has inbound fax capability were all lines can be fax/voice lines as well.

No I was incorrect the functionality of shared voice/fax lines is new with 2010 UM.

Thanks... Robert

Thanks for the response.
I dont' plan on doing VOIP outside of our environment, we have PRI trunks that give us access to the PSTN so the Mitel3300 would just be the gateway to that. The Faxes would be traveling from one server rack to another one over a Gigabit connection (not even over our private WAN) so i don't think it would be a problem for bandwidth.

I agree with you a "hosted" fax (like efax) might be a better solution and I am researching that as an option as well to make an educated comparison for what our needs are and how they align with each technology.

I'll report back just for the sake of keeping a complete thread once i get all my ducks in a row - If anyone else had info they'd like to add please do!

Thanks,
Andrew