Tapi for windows and mail2fax / fax2mail

General Help
1

dear community.

i should setup a tapi interface for my latest freepbx installation.

  1. which software i should use? is ther a free solution possible?
  2. how i can setup fax2mail
  3. how i can setup mail2fax

can anybody helps me?

thanks very much

2

Your three questions are almost completely unrelated.

  1. There are lots of “click to dial” options - they all depend on what you are doing and what your environment looks like. Some are only browser based, some are specific to a particular CRM system. There’s no “best” at this point - Asterisk development has been outstripping these applications pretty effectively for the past three or four versions.

  2. Fax to Mail is handled through the incoming FAX set up on your PBX. Look for information on setting this up in Asterisk.

  3. Mail to Fax is handled through an external application that reads your mail spool (usually as an IMAP or POP3 agent) and then processes the file through the “outgoing” FAX configuration on your server.

There are commercial packages you can add to FreePBX for 1) and 3), but 2) is largely built-in, you’ll just have to follow the abundant instructions for setting it up.

3

Hello Dave,

thank you for you answer!

okay, that means for TAPI driver and Mail2Fax, which commercial product for freepbx i need (which module)?
for Mail2Fax i need Fax Pro, or? And for the TAPI, which commercial module i need for this?
Incoming Calls + Outgoing Calls over Windows TAPI Driver.

Second question:
any possibility to get this working with only open source power?

thank you very much

many greets

5

You need to adjust your thought process in two ways.

1 - FreePBX is (largely) a management interface for Asterisk. You don’t need to interface anything to FreePBX - most of what you are asking about is interfacing with Asterisk, which is a separate “product” from FreePBX. Like most good partnerships, the Asterisk/FreePBX collaboration allows people to do more with the systems more simply, but it is not a panacea for every little niche need out there. The project is still largely open source, so you are expected to do a lot of the work yourself.

2 - TAPI has little to nothing to do with FreePBX. The concept of a telephony API comes from the Windows side of the discussion, so you will still need to find a telephony API application that works with your environment. Let me say that again - you will need identify your needs on the Windows or Mac side before you can start to evaluate TAPI and/or “Click-To-Dial” applications. Without understanding what you need from the application, there is no way anyone can make a reasonable recommendation on what you need to install to get this working.

The commercial product that FreePBX works with is a CRM interface that connects FreePBX to your Customer Resource Management application. You don’t need to buy it, but it is a LOT more convenient to install and run than spend hours and hours trying to get everything to work. You can contact Sangoma for more information - while I appreciate their support for the project, I’m not a “shill for the man.”

Mail2Fax, like TAPI, is external to FreePBX. FAXPro might help you with this, I don’t know - I’ve never used it. I’m sure one of the Sales Guys from Sangoma can help you to see if it meets your needs. Regardless, the idea is that a program that runs outside your FreePBX installation interfaces with FreePBX by creating and queueing an outbound FAX, which the system then sends. Once again - this isn’t something that is part of FreePBX and there are a million applications out there that can do this - you will be interfacing with the native Asterisk implementation under FreePBX for this.

Incoming FAX is unrelated to outgoing FAX, insofar as the system’s needs are concerned. You need a FAX interface, and there are LOTS of websites, Wikis, and YouTube videos that talk about the various concerns that come up when you want to install an inbound FAX line. For the most part, FreePBX is all ready to go for inbound FAX processing - you just need to follow the instructions in the Wiki.

As to Open Source projects that can help you - there are thousands of them in various states of repair. Some work with specific versions of Asterisk, some have FreePBX modules associated, some don’t, some work with lots of generic telephony services. I have no doubt there are projects out there that can help you accomplish your goals. It’s time to start using Google and seeing what’s out there.

6

Thank you very much for your help!

Thanks!