Seasons Greetings

We hope you have a peaceful holiday season.  Copia offices will be closed until Monday January 6th but we will try to respond to any urgent support e-mail over the holiday.

Watch this space for a series of postings describing new features we have been working on for the next major CopiaFacts release, version 8.2.  We will start to introduce these features early in the New Year.

Fax Aware ATA

NetGen comes through with IP.fax media-feature tag on its Smart ATA's - One step closer to cutting the POTS cord! http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20130528-905409.html "More needs to be done, but together, these initiatives will set the stage for the 'PSTN cord' to be cut," added Steve Hersee, CEO of Copia International, a Smart ATA user. Hersee continued, "The stage is set, but now the industry needs players: equipment vendors that support RFC6913 and carriers that use it in their routing decisions. Copia is pleased that NetGen is the first in the ATA industry to announce support for this significant industry milestone. We intend to lobby our service-provider partners to support it."

Enhancements for FFVIEWER

After a recent set of enhancements for FFBC, our next target has been the fax viewer.  Again the principal objective has been to improve ease and speed of use.

The list of enhancements this time includes:

• The mail selection dialog which is used to select incoming faxes for viewing has several new features.  You can now sort entries on individual columns, and filter contents to find items faster.  The preview window has also been enhanced to allow viewing of any page of the document.
• For dragging the image on the main window, we have exchanged the functions of the two mouse buttons.  The left mouse button now does a simple drag, moving the picture at the same rate and the same distance that you move the mouse.  The right mouse drag now does the accellerated drag which used to be done by the left button, where the amount of mouse movement controls the speed of movement of the picture.  Using the right mouse button you can quickly skip from the top to the bottom of a page without the need to do mutliple drag-release operations.  And in the new version this also works when annotations are visible.
• In case you find the exchanged mouse button functions confusing, we have provided a 'settings' option to retain the original configuration!
• For users who need to position annotations accurately, either for their own or for bureau clients' customization applications, we have greatly increased the ease of working with annotations.  Instead of just a simple annotation number, the annotation header now includes full position and size information, continuously updated as you move or resize the annotation, as well as much more information in the hint window:

• If you prefer to set your annotation  position and size 'by numbers' there is a new item on the annotation menu which brings up a window where you can enter exact position and size:

Finally, there are several small enhancements, including the ability to undo an annotation move after you have clicked on it with an unsteady hand and found it in a slightly different place.  And some minor fixes which are detailed in the reference manual, along with improved documentation of annotations and other FFVIEWER features.  See http://www.copia.com/support/refmanual8/index.html?annotation.htm.

These changes are in build 8.1.0.123.

Copia partners with babyTEL to provide Fax over IP service

Last week we announced the successful completion of interoperability testing of CopiaFacts with babyTEL Fax over IP (FoIP) services.

You can find background information and links in the press release here.  Please contact Copia sales if you would like to evaluate FoIP through babyTel on your CopiaFacts fax server.

Enhancements for the FFBC Broadcast Manager

Added up over all CopiaFacts customers, it is likely that a similar number of broadcast faxes and e-mails are sent from FFBC as are sent by larger users from Job Administration.  We have recognized this by upgrading and enhancing FFBC to introduce some of the features enjoyed by Job Administration users. The basic structure of the program is unchanged, and will remain familiar to current FFBC users, but hopefully we have made it easier and quicker to use.

The only elements that have been removed are the job owner and ID fields for the legacy job management system (you can still enter this information in the template editor) and the counts of multiple .1 .2 .3 files making up a single document, which have been replaced by more useful fields showing the file size.  The file size field enables you to see at a glance how long each broadcast item is likely to take to transmit.

Among the many improvements are:

• A new document selection dialog, which makes it easier to select individual files for broadcasting.
• The ability to pick a non-TIF document to be broadcast and have it pre-converted to fax format.  For PDF documents, this is done directly in FFBC: other document types are passed to Document Converter for pre-conversion.  You can also convert high-resolution TIF files to standard resolution from the same document selection dialog, and view both original and converted documents.
• The OmitListHeader option, which treats the first row of the broadcast list as a header instead of one to be faxed or e-mailed, has been extended with the CreateBCXVars option, which causes 'BCX' variables to be generated from the column names.  So you can now refer to the faxnumber as @BCX_FAXNO as well as @BCF1 if you have a header row which names its column as 'FAXNO'.
• You no longer have to manually edit commands like $fax_phone in the FS template.  Instead, you can right click a column header in the broadcast list and select 'use for fax number': this will automatically set up a $fax_phone command referencing the column you have selected and right-clicked.  The same method can be used to set up voice and e-mail broadcasts by selecting the column.  A new box on the Broadcast page confirms the type of broadcast that has been selected and what list column contains the destination.
• The columns you have picked for phone, e-mail, and recipient name are identified by different colors in the broadcast list display.  This feature has also been added in JOBADMIN.
• Checkboxes are provided for the De-Dupe and OmitListHeader and CreateBCXVars options: no need to remember the FFBC_OPTIONS syntax.
• There's a new button to open the selected user profile, in case you need to edit retry parameters or other settings.
• FFBC can now set the enhanced broadcast scheduling options introduced last year.  You can set up a schedule for times of day between which a broadcast can be sent, and you can optionally specify that these times are to be based on the time zone derived from the area or country code of the destination phone number.  And you are no longer limited to setting times in quarter-hour increments.  If you want a broadcast to start at 8:23, you can do that (and in JOBADMIN).

Along with all these enhancements we have re-tested everything and fixed a few minor bugs and cosmetic issues along the way.

Finally the documentation has been rewritten to include all the new features: you can find it at: http://www.copia.com/support/refmanual8/index.html?ffbc.htm.  The new features are in build 8.1.0.122.