Windows Faxing in an Exchange 2007 Environment

It never ceases to amaze me how setting up a new service for a client that can seemingly be so trivial can become so complicated.

While setting up a new Windows Fax solution for a client I ran into some challenges after deploying the solution.

1. Windows Server 2008 Standard only supports 4 fax modems.  Not such a big problem considering the client has a 6 server environment.  Since they were running on the Microsoft EBS 2008 suite I decided to use the Management and Messaging systems to double as fax servers.  Using 2 Digi Rapidport 4-line USB modems I managed to configure their 6 fax line setup with relative easy.

2.  After configuring the fax routing for e-mail the client also requested the ability to send inbound faxes to a single printer in their Estimating department to print the faxes during a job closing.  Again not a big issue until they requested the ability to do this themselves.  Since the fax service was running on two different servers I tried to configure a single mmc console to provide a centralized management interface however every time I would close the console it would “forget” one of the servers and just say local.  To get around the issue I setup a RemoteApp on each server and customized the RDP file to place on a mangers system.  However this proved to be another challenge as the app would prompt for user account control but not display the request without clicking on the details button.  So i created a little script to call the mmc which automatically prompts the user for UAC after login.  With a little training the Manager was able to turn on and off printing at will.

3.  My final hurdle came when about 20% of the faxes were not routing through e-mail properly.  This proved to be very frustrating since it was only an issue with the Fax service on the Exchange server.  I tried multiple log on methods (anonymous, basic, integrated) and ports to no avail.  It would work for a while but then just stop routing.  I tried a hotfix from MS as well but this did not work either.  Since EBS has a 2 Exchange Server environment I decided to send the faxes through the Security (Edge Transport) server on port 25 using integrated authentication.  BINGO!  Everything is working properly now.

In the future if I’m dealing with a 4+ fax environment I’m going to recommend a separate server and Windows Server Enterprise to keep things simple.  Nonetheless I feel like I’ve gained some useful knowledge and hope this helps someone else in need.