City of Melbourne installs one of Australia's first Cisco T.38 IP Fax solutions

MESSAGEmanager Solutions has installed one of Australia's first T.38 IP Fax solutions, for the City of Melbourne, one of the fastest growing municipalities in Australia.

City of Melbourne required a replacement fax solution that integrated into its new Cisco® VoIP telephone system and Cisco LAN, supported international standards and provided an interface to Oracle Financials and Microsoft Exchange.

The solution needed to be fast, reliable and to include smart error handling. Although usage of fax has probably plateaued, the City of Melbourne still sends and receives many purchase orders and invoices to suppliers and partners by fax, each week.

"MESSAGEmanager IP FAX Server supports the T.38 standard for real-time IP FAX as ratified by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). This defines the procedures to be applied to allow Group 3 facsimile transmission between terminals, where a portion of the transmission path between terminals includes, the PSTN or ISDN, and an IP network " said Ivor Livingston MESSAGEmanager Solutions CEO.

"MESSAGEmanager FAX Server is a software-only solution which uses the City of Melbourne's Cisco routers to interface with the telephone network (PSTN) eliminating the requirement to purchase fax server specific telephony boards," said Livingston.

The software-only solution has allowed the City of Melbourne to reduce the number of Fax based servers.

With some 12,500 different businesses and organisations, a working population of a third of a million, and a resident population that has risen by a third in the last five years the City of Melbourne is one of the most progressive municipalities in Australia. This was also highlighted recently by the City of Melbourne designing and building what is described as the healthiest and greenest office building in the world; CH2 in Little Collins Street.

The move into the new CH2 building prompted the Council to review its IT services in light of its strategy of integration and of environmental concern, recognising new technologies were becoming available that would potentially fit into its environmental strategies, as well as its long term ICT (Information and Communications Technology) plans.

The production system runs on HP BL20p Dual Intel Xeon Processor 3.20 GHz with 1Gb RAM and Windows 2003 Service Pack 1. The connection into the PSTN system is via three Cisco 2811 Routers and five OnRamp 30 (ISDN) services.

- Cisco LAN implementation and support provided by Netstar Australia.
- IP FAX implementation and support provided by MESSAGEmanager Solutions.

About MESSAGEmanager Solutions
Founded in 1982, MESSAGEmanager Solutions is the Australian based developer of MESSAGEmanager intelligent messaging (IM) and communication solutions. With over 20 years experience developing telex, fax, SMS, voice and IVR solutions, MESSAGEmanager Solutions has developed a reputation for innovation in technology aligned with real world business strategies.

MESSAGEmanager Solutions customers are located in Australia, Asia Pacific, Europe, USA and Africa across industries including financial services, construction, health, government, professional services, retail, transport and ICT.