As you can see, its incredibly easy to send faxes from Microsoft Outlook. In fact, its even easier to send from Outlook than it was to send from SMTP since you have access to all of the Advanced Faxing Options on the Office Ribbon.
When you click the Fax button, you’ll get a condensed version of the New Fax Dialog. Enter the name of the person you are sending a fax to along with their fax number. This will begin to fill in the details of your fax cover sheet. Click done to close the dialog. When you return to the Microsoft Outlook message, you’ll see that the To: line has been filled in with a specially formatted string. Now you can enter your subject. The average fax cover sheet typically won’t have a subject, so we take that information to fill in the cover sheet notes for the fax. If you enter anything into the body of your email message, that text will become the first page of the fax.
So what about attachments? Attachments in your Microsoft Outlook message become each of the pages after the first page and/or the fax cover sheet.
One of the features you get in the Microsoft Outlook integration that you don’t get with SMTP is access to the Advanced Faxing Option. On this dialog you can set billing codes, other fields for the fax cover sheet, attach Library Documents defined on the RightFax Fax Server, and much more.
When you click on send, the message is sent. This message actually starts its life as an email and Microsoft Outlook hands it off to the back-end server called Microsoft Exchange. Exchange looks at the address that you entered at the top and sees that it includes the word: rfax. That’s a magic setting which tells Exchange to export the email to a special folder that the RightFax Fax Server monitors. Within a minute or so, the RightFaxFax Server picks up the message, processes it, and sends it out as a single, multiple-page fax, complete with fax cover sheet and attachments.
The integrations with products like Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, and SMTP are part of what makes the RightFax Fax Server so powerful.