fax from Orace E-business Suite

I recently received the question from someone if I wanted to look into the possibilities to setup a rather cheap service for sending faxes into the world. The solution should be able to handle faxes which where send from the Oracle E-Business suite 11.5.10.2. In Oracle E-Business suite 11.5.10.2 you have the option in the Oracle Purchasing module to do a couple of things when approving a PO (Purchase Order). You can print the purchase order, you can send it to the supplier as a e-mail, you can use IDE/XML or you can send a fax.

One of the question was that Oracle E-Business suite should be able to use the fax server to send faxes and also users in the network should be able to send faxes from their workstations. Windows users, UNIX/Linux users and Mac users should be able to send faxes from their desktops. Considering those two wishes their where some additional things, it had to be cheap, only one faxserver was to be setup and preferably it should be opensource.

After some investigating via google I came out at HylaFAX, HylaFAX is a opensource fax server capable of all those things. Besides the work done by the people from HylaFAX some other people started to code applications arround the HylaFAX server and you can find java API's which can be used to start coding your own 'gateway ' applications to the fax server. Without much coding you can setup Oracle E-Business suite to use the HylaFAX server.

If you are ever in need to setup a "small" fax server which needs to have all (or some) of the named capabilties you might want to look into HylaFax. And I placed small within quotes becasue you can create quite a large faxserver with HylaFAX.