A Career Limiting Move?

THIS SITE WILL GO AWAY SOON. PLEASE UPDATE YOUR LINKS TO THE NEW FAX BLOG : FaxSolutionsBlog.OpenText.com

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.

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Joshua Butcher – Signing In!

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.

Stay tuned from some blogs from me soon!

Joshua

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I’m a Nerd, Deal with It!

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.

-billb

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Adam’s Introduction

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).

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Building the Open Text Learning Community!

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.

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Welcome to the OTFDDG Training Team Blog

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.

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