Today I have been experimenting with HylaFax Enterprise Edition and the Dialogic Brooktrout SR140. The HylaFax EE has support for SQL database, T.38 and/or barcode recognition on top of the features available with the Open-Source version of HylaFax. The Dialogic software emulates hardware interfaces like the Dialogic Brooktrout TR1034 for the HylaFax Server, this makes Hylafax almost completely independent from the interface used. Unfortunately the HylaFax server leaves a lot of fax signal handling up to the hardware/software interface, so you may only use interfaces that can handle/produce these signals on-board, which reduces the choice, the load on the system’s CPU but it also increases the maximal number of channels that may be handled by one system, unfortunately this also increases the costs.

The SR140 provides a SIP stack with support for T.38 and G.711. After 1 day of test with different destinations and from different sources the T.38 implementation seems to very robust but also very tolerant while handling the different T.38 “dialects”.

When you are looking to build a fax-2-email system, the HylaFax solution will provide this service within minutes of installation. The other way around (email-2-fax) requires only a few more minutes as the required HylaFax service is easily integrated into sendmail or postifx.