IBM Kills Off Fax/400, But Alternatives Are Available
August 19, 2024 Alex Woodie
IBM will cease supporting Facsimile Support for i, commonly known as Fax/400, with the next release of the IBM i operating system, it announced last month. That tees up an opportunity for third-party vendors like Fresche Solutions and others to fill the void for a communication technology that is still used by businesses.
The IBM Facsimile Support for i (5798-FAX) product was not among the group of 16 IBM i products that IBM initially withdrew from sales and support with its discontinuance of support letter back on May 7, the same day that it announced the latest technology refreshes (TRs) for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5.
However, when IBM updated the sunsetted product list on its IBM Support website on July 1, Fax/400 was among the list of 21 products that won’t be supported with the next release of IBM i. (The other four products added to the list with the July 1 update are Binary Synchronous Communications [Bisync] protocol; Point to Point Protocol [PPP] and Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol [L2TP]; IBM Technology for Java 11 64-bit IBM Semeru Runtime Certified Edition; IBM Technology for Java 11 64-bit [Option 19 of product 5770-JV1]; and Management Central.)
To replace Fax/400, IBM suggested IBM i shops look to the independent software vendor (ISV) community. Specifically, it named the CloudFax product from International Presence; the BlueSeries Fax offering from System & Method A/S; and the FastFax offering from Fresche Solutions.
- International Prescence is a UK company that’s been operating in the IBM world since 1986. Its CloudFax product, which it launched in 2012, is geared specifically toward IBM i shops who want to get out of operating their own fax environment.
- System & Method A/S is a Danish company that’s been active on IBM i for more than 30 years. The company’s BlueSeries offering supports fax communications using dedicated phone lines and fax modems, or via thin device servers that connect to the IBM i via TCP/IP.
- Fresche Solutions sells a variety of software and services on IBM i. Among its many offerings is FastFax, a Windows Server-based fax server that connects to IBM i and other platforms.
Fax may seem like an archaic technology to use in the Internet era, but it’s still widely utilized in some industries, said Deb Walsh, the technical support manager for FastFax at Fresche Solutions.
“Fax is still very important to business. It’s not going anywhere,” she said. “A lot of the larger food distributors are still very highly dependent upon the fax. A lot of government agencies such still want that, as well as health care companies, and shipping companies and trucking.”
While sending an email may be quicker and easier, an email doesn’t easily satisfy legal communication requirements the way that a fax does, Walsh said. That’s due to the distributed nature of email on the Web, where an email may hit multiple servers and email relays.
To legally prove that an email was received, every stop on its journey must be tracked and recorded. Fax, on the other hand, is a point-to-point communication method, and when a fax server records that it has received a fax, that document is legally binding and will stand up in court.
Not everybody is looking to fax as a source of legally binding documents, however. For some companies, fax is just an established part of day-to-day business. Changing old habits can be hard in the business world, especially when we’re talking about a technology like fax that has been around for many decades.
The fax world is not a monolith, however, and there are many different variations. Many fax customers are running the technology in a virtual environment, and they may automatically route incoming faxes to electronic storage. But some customers prefer to have fax machines connected to analog phone lines.
“It still does occur a lot where faxing into customer systems, they’re receiving it and then they’re throwing it into their document archival, their RVi solution or whatever solution,” she said. “But then it’s also mom and pop shops where people still walk over and pick it up off of that fax machine as well.”
The FastFax offering today is a virtual product. FastFax itself is a Windows Server product that requires a small virtual machine. Instead of analog telephone lines at $45 per month per line, it utilizes Internet connections that speak SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), the protocol used for Voice over IP (VOIP) connections.
Here’s how FastFax works in an IBM i environment, according to Walsh:
When an IBM i user or a program executes the send fax command (or the submit fax command for batch workloads), the FastFax subsystem running on IBM i grabs the spool file, calls the Host Print Transform (HPT) facility, converts it to a PCL file, and places it on a shared folder on the IBM i server’s Integrated File System (IFS).
Meanwhile, the FastFax server running in the cloud or on a Windows VM is notified of the outgoing (or incoming) fax through an ODBC connection to a work file on the Db2 for i database. That initiates the connection between the FastFax server and the IBM i subsystem.
“The FastFax server would pull it down, convert it, and, depending on what we’re doing, we would convert it to a PDF file and email it out, or if we were going to send it as a fax, we’d convert it to a Tiff file and then fax it out,” Walsh told IT Jungle.
FastFax can maintain any custom templates the customer has developed in AFP, including fonts and graphics. If the customer wants to make changes to their templates, they’re encouraged to buy a subscription to Fresche’s Formtastic solution.
Migrating from Fax/400 to FastFax is relatively fast and painless, Walsh said. Besides setting up and configuring the FastFax system on a Windows Server, most of the work lies in replacing the Facsimile Support for i commands with the FastFax “send fax” and “submit fax” commands.
“It’s really as easy as that,” she said. “Any type of programming customers have done to automatically send faxes within applications, that should all still work as long as you’ve gone in and changed the name of the command everywhere.”
IBM i customers have already taken notice of the end of support for Facsimile Support for i, and are seeking alternatives.
“We’ve received a few phone calls from customers now that are planning to get up to V7R5 that are now looking for that replacement,” Walsh said.
Subscriptions for FastFax start at $800 per month, which includes all FastFax modules, including the IBM i component for a single LPAR, and support for two SIP lines. Additional lines are available for $1,000 per year. For more information, click here.
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