Hi Howard.
Unfortunately Lightning Fax doesn’t support sending faxes using a custom recipient… you’d think setting the address up as “[FAX:name@number]” would work, unfortunately the “FAX” portion gets stripped and their gateway never gets it. I’m trying to work out some sort of work around to this, but so far nothing works.
You CAN have fax recipients show up in the directory, however, by jumping through a couple hoops with a public folder. To do this, follow these steps.
1. Using an administrator account (i.e. someone that has rights to create public folders in via Outlook) open up Outlook and create personal contacts for all the fax recipients you want to make available in the address book for everyone. All you need to do is provide a name and fill in the “Business fax” field to do this. If you also add an email address you’ll see two entries in the address book, one for “email” and one for “Business fax” so you’ll probably want to leave the email off.
2. Create a public folder called, say, “Fax Recipients” or something really creative like that. When you create the folder be sure to set to hold “contact items” not “mail items” or this wont work.
3. Once you’ve created it, right click on it and select properties. Go to the “Outlook Address Book” tab and be sure to check the “Show this folder as an email address book” option.
4. Copy your fax contacts from your “contacts” list to the public folder.
Now when folks want to send a fax to one of these guys, they can select the “Fax Recipients” container in their address book and all these guys are there. I know this isn’t exactly what you’re looking for since there’s no way (that I can figure out anyway) to “bundle” a number of these fax recipients into a DL so you can send faxes to all of them at once without have to select them individually. I’ve asked for help from the Interstar guys on this and we’re looking into possible work arounds. If we figure something out, I’ll be sure to post it here.
We’re also working through the features on the next fax version we’ll be getting from them and this is one of the things we’ve asked for (i.e. somehow fixing the Custom Recipient problem such that you can create fax users in the Exchange directory). I can’t say if it’ll get in or when we’ll have it in hand, but we have identified this as something we’d like to see get cleaned up.
Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect
Active Voice
jlindborg@activevoice.com
http://members.home.net/jlindborg
