Macromedia and RightFax

The Company

Macromedia, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, develops and markets cross-platform software tools for digital media creation and publishing. These products are used by organizations to create and deliver interactive applications that use a full range of media from text and graphics to animation, video, and sound.

The Problem

Before Macromedia's 35-member sales group migrated from Macintoshes to PCs, it used a Macintosh-based fax product that supported outbound faxing only. However, Alan Loo, technical analyst for Macromedia, describes that Mac-based solution as "painfully slow." In fact, it was so slow that users learned to keep fax broadcasting to minimum in order to prevent their server from hanging, and several users even went back to using standalone fax machines. Therefore, when the sales group decided to migrate to a PC platform, it also immediately began searching for a more robust, PC-based fax solution.

The Solution

The sales team sought advice from Karen Edwards and her sales force at Epigraphx, a reseller based in San Carlos, California. "We approached Epigraphx, described our current fax system, and asked them to suggest a replacement based on several criteria, including price, performance, features, and ease of use," says Loo. "They came back to us with a product called RightFax that they determined would meet our needs. After they demonstrated the product to our most discriminating users, we were sold."

The product worked so well, in fact, that soon the marketing group requested it. Currently, nearly 150 Macromedia employees use RightFax.

Incoming faxes are routed directly to the addressee using RightFax's DID (direct inward dial) feature. Each RightFax user is assigned a phone number for their fax mailbox. Then, when the fax server answers calls to that phone number, it routes the incoming fax to the appropriate user. Loo says this feature alone makes RightFax a value. "We used to use a central fax number for the entire corporation," Loo says. "Then, when faxes arrived, a receptionist would notify the intended recipient and wait for that individual to pick up the fax. In the meantime, faxes were piling up and employees had to go from floor to floor to pick up their faxes. Not only did it take a long time to get to that central area, but often the faxed information was confidential and was intended only for the addressee's eyes. And yet it was just part of that growing pile of paper that everyone was looking through. "Now, with RightFax," Loo continues, "each fax goes directly to the appropriate person. It's fast and it's secure."

Macromedia got an added bonus with RightFax's OCR (optical character recognition) module. This module scans graphic images for recognizable characters and converts them to dynamic text files that can be imported into any application. Once the files are converted, they can be edited, revised, illustrated, annotated, forwarded, and more. "Before we started using RightFax, if we received a fax containing text we wanted to reuse, we had to actually retype the data, which not only takes time to key but introduces the possibility of new errors. We frequently use the OCR feature to recycle price list data. You simply fax the price list to yourself, convert the fax to text, and import the data directly into your application of choice, Excel, in our case. It's fast and precise."

Macromedia also uses the OCR feature for sending out data sheets on the company's products, Loo says. "Rather than running around searching for a data sheet to fax, we just fax online documents. They're easy to find and always up-to-date."

Although Macromedia was primarily interested in the inbound/outbound capabilities of a fax product, the company's technical staff also wanted a product that was easy to administer and troubleshoot. "Most software applications require one of our technicians to be physically at the user's computer to troubleshoot and diagnose a problem. However, with RightFax our help desk personnel can easily assume the role of the end user to see whether that user has set up the software correctly or diagnose why the fax hasn't been sent or received."

Macromedia currently is installing RightFax's Web Client module in order to give their Macintosh clients faxing capabilities. The Web Client module installs as an addition to the Microsoft Web server and works as a liaison between it and the RightFax fax server. Clients are presented with a Web interface similar to RightFax's intuitive user interface, which gives them access to the same RightFax database normally accessible only on the LAN.