ohk, faxwerkx long gone, whatever, the question wuz-and I paraphrase: "do we need an open os/2 fax project going on or not"? ie should it ]faxworks or pmfax or whatever it is that is defunct[ be replaced by something like it but more mod? I say no
My perceptions (as wrong as they could be) are that any fax solution for OS/2 should be easily scriptable, and as capable as PMFax and FaxWorks Pro (and like them, preferably with REXX).
I base that on the fact that all of my clients who need faxing solutions, all need them for automated things... one client needs fax-out capability where the faxes can be created and sent via an address book (part of the fax app, or from a database) to numerous recipients, all "personalized" - that was trivial with FaxWorks Pro.
Another client needs to be able to receive faxes, have them OCR'd automatically, call an external app (or preferably a REXX script) to parse the OCR'd text, and then insert the data into a MySQL database, and trigger a notification script/app that then sends out pages (ie: pager pages) and/or sends the data to various remote stations (or makes it available via polling from the remote station). Again, very trivial for FaxWorks Pro.
Other than a fancy GUI and support for newer modems, I dont know of anything that FaxWorks Pro is lacking - and it's a true, native OS/2 app (and performs as such).
For my second customer example, I plan on buying a bunch of old faxmodems to install, and run FaxWorks Pro. For the first, it's a "future plan" that they may never implement - but I need a solution for if they do. And as always, I'd prefer it's a "running on OS/2 or eComStation" solution. We have a support contract with each customer... and I thoroughly enjoy never having to come up to update/fix/de-virus the servers we have installed (
all are running eComStation). I plan on keeping those servers that way - even if it means dusting off as many copies of FaxWorks Pro and buying as many old faxmodems as I can find. The only problem I have, is if we get as many of these accounts as we can (125 total potential ones in this area alone), I am sure to run out of available/findable copies of FaxWorks Pro and available/findable supported faxmodems.
IF we were guaranteed all of the accounts in this area, we would subsidize part of the cost to update FaxWorks Pro... but we dont know whether we will get one more account... or 120 more accounts... so we aren't in a position to want to do that, since spending such money (for what may be one more account) would be a stupid business move. We'd
buy it for each if it were available, on an as needed basis.
Robert