Have you ever pretended to know a lot about something you only knew a little about? A few years ago a colleague was very excited about a technology called the Shared Services Module slated to ship in the next release of Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition. (Back then it was called Captaris RightFax). I got excited too and started telling coworkers. I actually felt pretty smart until someone asked, “Multiple servers using a single database? What does that mean exactly?”
How rude! How dare he ask me to explain what I was pretending to be able to explain. Nobody else bothered to ask. Dho!
I didn’t know how the Shared Services Module worked. I didn’t even know why people might care about it or buy it. All I knew was that I wasn’t going to talk about it anymore until I had a better handle on it. At least not to that guy.
If you don’t necessarily fully grasp the key Shared Services Module concepts, then I hope to help you understand before you’re asked to explain. To accomplish this, I wrote a blog entry with lots of diagrams. So many pictures, in fact, that it would have taken up way too much space here.
So, this blog entry is now this video.
Feel free to make some suggestions for improving the video. Or ask follow up questions about the Shared Services Module. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll find out for you.
I have been in the technical support business for almost 12 years now troubleshooting anything from operating systems, to routers, to – well, faxing. During that time, I have worked with a lot of people with various skill sets and I have determined there are basically two types of support professionals: Support Technicians and Support Engineers.
Support Technicians: Typically have a good grasp of the fundamentals, techniques and usage of a project. They are great at finding resources and providing documented solutions to issues that end users, and even administrators, may not have been able to find on their own.
Support Engineers: They are the ones who find solutions to issues that are possibly not documented at all. They must be able to take a product and reverse engineer it to determine what is really happening beneath the hood. Because of this process of dissection and analysis, they are able to develop instincts of how the product works and therefore are able to come up with creative solutions that a technician may never even consider.
Fax Flow Troubleshooting
How well do you know the Open Text Fax Server (RightFax)? The real question is – How well do you want to know it? If you want to look under the hood and see how the parts work together, but do not have the time to become a programmer – we have the perfect course for you: Fax Flow Troubleshooting.
In the Fax Flow Troubleshooting course, we break down the processing of a faxes into stages so we can follow the faxes all the way through the fax server. We then systematically stop and start services to follow the faxes to see how they are processed and why they were processed the way that they were.
Here is a sample from the Fax Flow Troubleshooting course:
If you want to learn more about the Open Text Fax Server (RightFax) through the process of reverse engineering, but just do not have the time dig in on your own, this course is for you!
Note: The course does have a prerequisite! It is for people who are already at have at least a technician level knowledge of the fax server but want to get a better feel for how it works. For this reason, you must be certified in the Fax Server Fundamentals before you will be permitted to attend this course.
Mastery of the fundamental ideas of a field involves not only the grasping of general principles, but also the development of an attitude toward learning and inquiry, toward guessing and hunches, toward the possibility of solving problems on one’s own. ~ Jerome Bruner
Seven years ago I was a confident and utterly bored Microsoft jock who was eager to break-free from the world of Microsoft-based computing and explore the wizard-less and GUI-free technologies that occupied the other side of the IT universe. My first step onto the other side was job at Captaris (Now OpenText) where I was hired to provide technical support for a product called RightFax (now known as Fax Server). Many of the products and technologies that RightFax integrated with (e.g., Lotus, Novell, and telephony), were for the most part, new to me and of great personal interest. However, despite my interest and eagerness to learn, I must admit that for a brief time I questioned whether trading the green fields of Microsoft for a seemingly decrepit technology (fax) was a wise career move. I mean, the most of us know that fax is on the fast track to extinction, right?
Endeavor to Persevere
The term facsimile (i.e., fax) is derived from the Latin phrase fac simile, which when loosely translated means to, ‘make a copy’. The advent of fax is traced to the year 1843 when the world’s first fax transmission took place. While the technology and protocols have changed many times since that first fax, its fundamental concept of capturing, encoding, transmitting, and receiving viable copies of documents and data remain and thus make it one of the world’s most popular (and secure) means of document delivery.
Although fax has many benefits, none are perhaps more important than its classification as a legal document. Simply put, signed documents (e.g., mortgage contracts) that are transmitted via fax are considered by most countries to be legally binding whereas documents received via e-mail are typically not. Moreover, fax provides a simple and effective means of achieving compliance with industry standards and regulatory mandates, such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Organizations that typically employ fax to deliver legal, contractual, or otherwise sensitive material include:
Financial institutions
Insurance companies
Health organizations
Government offices
Law firms
In the coming months, my colleagues and I will use this blog to elaborate on this and other topics that help make fax an enduring and ever-evolving technology.
Hello all, let me first say that I am excited about this blog site. We have tons of things we want to share with you about these products as well as things that have kept us sane working in the world of corporate software biz. I need to share a little bit about myself so here we go.
I have been working with the company for a little over six years now. I started out providing technical support so I have a pretty good idea what it is like to have to come up with solutions when there is nothing available. Before working at Open Text, I did technical support, and training, for Lucent Technologies as well as with Microsoft (working with Windows 95/98/XP). I am now a senior technical instructor in Tucson, AZ focusing primarily on fax servers and messaging.
I have a Bachelors in Information Technology, a Masters in Education (with an emphasis in instruction and curriculum design) and am currently working on a Masters in English (with an emphasis on professional and technical writing). As you can tell, I value education a lot and getting excited when others do too. That is why I think this blog is so important.
Having survived through the global economic crisis so far, many organizations are still cutting back on operating expenses as I’m sure you can directly relate! One of the first to go was non-essential travel for the non-executive, especially if that travel is related to a technical resource spending non-billable time sitting in a multi-day technical training course. As nice as it is in the fall and winter months to spend a week in the US Southwest or US Southeast, you will most likely have a hard time justifying the travel, hotel, car, meals and training course expenses. I’m sure you’ve done the calculations. If you haven’t, check with your finance group because you can be certain they have.
With that fairly lengthy introduction and if the majority of you (our partners and customers) are faced with this challenge then how do you get the training required to do your job effectively? You still need to gain the knowledge and skills right? Isn’t technical training best delivered in a classroom setting? How can you possibly learn anything unless you can physically be in the same location? All great questions and we are here to help! We have modified our delivery approach over the past 24 months and now offer a couple of great alternatives and delivery methods to supplement traditional classroom training. It’s important to note that we do still offer classroom based courses but only in select regions so it’s important to check the schedule.
1. Virtual Classroom. There are many different names for it; Virtual classroom, Instructor online, Instructor web conference, etc… Bottom line, this is the most effective approach to bring the classroom experience to your browser and phone without the travel and related expenses. The tool we use is a proven and market leading web conference tool that has training functionality built in:
Interact and ask questions of the Instructor as you would in class
View the Instructor presentation and demo of a particular product function or lab exercise
Follow along in the training manual and related materials
Log on to an actual virtual machine instance of the software for that invaluable hands-on practice
2. eLearning. Again, many different names; online learning, self-paced, web-based training, etc. This training is available to you on your schedule and at your pace. We manage a growing library of content that includes online courses, video instruction, downloadable materials, interactive simulations and online testing. Again, the benefit here is that it’s available to you now and at no cost!
We are committed to developing learning content that is relevant for what you need today and delivering it in a way that will make the most impact at the lowest cost! We’re always open to your ideas and feedback and your input is greatly appreciated!
Greetings! I’m a geek and I like words. I’m a training developer with Brad Wittman’s training team here at Open Text’s Fax and Document Distribution Group.
If you don’t believe I’m a nerd, consider this. In 1987 I was programming databases for a contractor at the NASA Ames Research Center, and received a small bonus. I knew exactly how to spend it, I’d been dreaming about only one thing for months. I bought a copy of Microsoft Word version 3.0 for DOS and, yes, of course I got the 4.0 upgrade later that year. These days, I have my eye on the HTC Touch Pro 2, arguably the hottest cell phone out right now. iPhone people please do not panic, I said arguably. Either way, I need something new, my current cell phone is from (gasp) April of 2008!
Between 1987 and today, I’ve been a database programmer, a DBA, an IT manager, a C++ programmer, a technology magazine editor, and was even a part-time radio DJ for a year. I have been with Open Text for four years now and I love my job. In addition to writing, I get to work with a lot of exciting technologies on the Open Text product side and on the training content development side.
While I have plenty of blogging ideas, I would toss them aside for reader suggestions so feel free to tell me what you want to hear about. If you have any smart(ypants) phone recommendations, pass them along too.
Wow, it has been quite some time since I have written anything besides technical training material so please forgive me if my writing sounds a little procedural in nature to start. I will do my best to limit numbered steps and bullet points.
I know you are thinking to yourself, what an exciting title to an entry, so enticing. I couldn’t think of anything better. Maybe I could have called it “From tiny RAM to Technical Trainer (see below) in 17 years”, but I like to be concise. So for now I think introduction to Adam will work. It is concise and to the point.
I am Adam Friedmann and have been around the many iterations of the company for 11 years. Some may argue however that I have only been here a year as I took a brief 2 year hiatus to start my own company. During my tenure with the company I have delivered training on Open Text Fax Server (RightFax) since version 4.2. In addition I have delivered training on Open Text Document Server and other sundry products.
Prior to my employment with Open Text I spent 3 years as a trainer with Lumisys. Lumisys made a number of products for the Radiology community and a few pieces of vaporware as well. Working for them was for the most part fun and at times challenging.
I began my career in the software industry with a company called Artisoft. For those old enough you might remember their product Lantastic, which was a popular peer to peer networking platform prior to Windows 95. Our mascot was a Ram (a sheep not the stuff that goes in your computer) because we said our networking stack took so little RAM on your computer. Oh for the days of computers that maxed out at 640K of RAM.
Believe it or not I have additional interests outside of faxing. I have a 17 year old son who is a senior in high school and every day provides many fun challenges and excitement. He marches in his school’s band and I get the joy of supporting him by being the band parent president.
I hope that as you follow my posts you will learn unique things you never knew about our products. I think it is vital to constantly be engaged with my students and our customers to better understand how our technology is utilized and bring that back into the classroom (or webex as the case may be).
My name is Brad Wittman and I’m responsible for the Fax and Document Distribution Learning team that enables our Partners and Customers to successfully sell, implement and support our products and solutions. We develop and deliver a variety of sustainable and repeatable Instructor-led and self-paced eLearning courses and content, utilizing innovative learning techniques and tools, designed for multiple learning styles and time/travel constraints.
Our purpose of this Learning blog is to expand the learning experience beyond the individual training sessions that we deliver. My postings will be specific to our strategy and approach to solving ongoing business challenges.
The way we all learn today is new and different from the traditional methods. Our goal is to make sure that what you’re learning from us today is sustainable and relevant to being more successful in your role.
Did you know that you can create a custom management interface for pretty much any Windows application with zero coding? Did you realize that you probably already have all the tools needed to get this done on your Windows workstation? Well you do, assuming your version of Windows was created in the last 10 to 15 years. The Microsoft Management Console, or MMC, was first made available for NT4 and Windows 9x and is the framework on which many built-in and 3rd party management tools are based. Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition ships with a few MMC-based tools, including the Server Console, and the Web management tools. The reason I am tell you about this is that it was the solution to an interesting issue a customer asked me about recently.
You see, they had a decent number of people who would be contributing information to an Alchemy repository. But after the training I delivered, they realized that the Administrator application gives those who use it a bit too much power, especially when it comes to completely destroying a database. The problem is that the Administrator is the only client application that can initiate a Build. So if they end up using Index Station for most of their users, how do they trigger a Build?
At first I suggested Scheduled Tasks. You can create a task that saves credentials and then can be run from the command line. The command I was going to run was albatch, which is a command line driven tool that comes out of the box with Alchemy. Unfortunately I couldn’t get albatch to work on a remote machine. Even with a SysInternals tool called psexec, I still couldn’t get anything going. So that’s when I remembered the MMC approach. I’ll explain both psexec and albatch in more detail in a short while.
My first experiment with MMC was when I was in the Education Marketing Group at Microsoft. I spent a good deal of time building cool demos of the technology that was part of Windows 2000. One of those demos involved allowing a group administrator or receptionist to reset the passwords of the workers in their group. That’s a function you can perform from Active Directory Users & Computers, but that’s a pretty daunting tool to use. If you create a new MMC and add the AD U&C Snap-In, you can drill down to a specific group or OU. Once there you create a taskpad when displaying a list of users, save the view and you have a custom password reset tool that can cause no extra problems. You can create this tool from scratch in less than 2 minutes with zero coding. I think that is pretty cool.
The tool I wanted to create for Building Alchemy was the Alchemy Builder Console, with one button each for building the databases in my environment. Here is a picture of the console configured to build just a single repository.
So how do you create this? Well, I am glad you asked. The first step is to launch MMC. Close the tree and maximize the main window. On the Menu bar, click Action and choose New TaskPad View. For this simple MMC, I like to use No List for the style. Next your way through the rest of the windows, giving the MMC a name along the way. When it comes to creating the first task, choose Shell Command. This tells the MMC that when you click on the button, you are going to run a command at the command prompt. So what is that command going to be?
This is where psexec and albatch come into view. Albatch comes with Alchemy and provides command-line access to many of the features of the product. The parameters are as follows:
So to build a server controlled database called Total on a server named Server, I need to run:
albatch alchemy://server/total.ald /build
That command works fine if you are on the server, but I need to run it from a remote PC. To run the command remotely, I can run psexec which is in the pstools suite from SysInternals.
In case you haven’t heard of SysInternals, go to their site now and read about all of their tools. Every single one of them is useful. As you can see in the screenshot below, psexec allows me to run an executable on a remote machine. Since I will be running this MMC on other PCs, I need psexec to be able to access albatch on the server.
Of course, you can’t run any command on any machine on your network without a valid username and password. So I created a local user on my server called albuilder. With that in mind, the command I used to run albatch is:
If the program completes with an error code of 0, you know that it ran without any problems. Now that i have a valid command, I can plug that into the shell command dialog in the MMC. To get the screenshot about, I went to the View | Customize window and turned off a few features. I also went to the File menu then Options. From there, choose User Mode Single Window and give the console a name. You can also change the icon if you want.
The video also shows how to create a custom Event Viewer, as well as a modified Alchemy Server Console that allows you to pick a database from the list and then click the build task. It uses the parameter parsing features of batch files that I had never seen before.
I hope you find this post and the YouTube video useful. If you have any questions, post them here. Also, if you have any ideas for future videos, let me know. Some ideas I am working on include setting up NLB for Shared Services, setting up a Cisco 2611XM router for simple FoIP, using SQL Profiler to get a view of what RightFax does behind the scenes, and more. Come back to this site often to see more from us on these topics.
I guess I could have abbreviated that a bit more, making it the OTFDDGTTB, but that might be taking it just a bit too far. In case you aren’t familiar with FDDG, we are what used to be called Captaris. Captaris was the company behind RightFax, Alchemy, and Workflow among other things and is now part of Open Text.
My name is Matthew Williams and I am the International Trainer for this team. The blog you are reading is a place for us to share what we are up to. Our intention is to post at least every week and hopefully even more often on all sorts of topics. And its not just me who will be posting. Expect to see posts from each of my colleagues (Adam, Bill, Erik, and Joshua) as well as our manager (Brad).
I am sure each one of them will be posting over the next few weeks with a short bio, but I’ll get the ball rolling with my own little blurb. I have been with this company for about five years, coming to Open Text with the acquisition of Captaris. I started out as a Sales Engineer based in San Francisco and then moved out here to Amsterdam to become a trainer over four years ago. Before that I held a bunch of different roles at Microsoft working out of Redmond, Washington. In fact, I was amongst the first five or six Microsoft Bloggers identified by Mary Jo Foley to watch. Prior to my time at Microsoft I held similar roles at NetObjects and PC DOCS (now Open Text), and performed outsourced marketing functions at Sun, Oracle, IBM, Intel and many others.
My intention here is to post on topics that interest me and my students. Some of the posts will flesh out some of the details from my YouTube posts (http://youtube.com/opentextfddg). If you have any suggestions of comments, post them here and I will automatically get notified.
Matt Williams
Brad Wittman
Erik Enderson
Bill Bernat
Adam Friedmann
joshuabutcher