Application Programming Interfaces to the FAXCOM Anywhere Service

Biscom offers programmers a range of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for developing applications that interface with the FAXCOM Anywhere Service. With these easy-to-use APIs, many of our customers and partners have successfully created custom fax communications applications and have also integrated fax communications with existing applications and processes.
The APIs for FAXCOM Anywhere communicate with a FAXCOM Queue Service. The fax queue service queues fax jobs for delivery to the FAXCOM Server, manages retries, retrieves fax job status messages and received faxes from the FAXCOM Server, and manages retries. With these APIs, your custom application does not need to incorporate these functions - it is all done for you.

APIs to the FAXCOM Anywhere Service include:

• .NET & Web Services
• COM
• SMTP
• Envelope Specification

NET & Web Services

The .NET API includes a .NET library that can be accessed by any programming language that supports Visual Studio Common Language Runtime. The API includes Web Services sample code for connecting to a FAXCOM Queue to send a fax and then retrieve a transmission status on the sent fax and also C# sample code for accessing message status collection, the pending queue, and received faxes.

COM API

The COM API provides an easy interface to the fax queue service from Visual Basic, C/C++ or any other programming or scripting language that supports COM objects. Because the COM API supports programming to standardized Windows programming environments, developers have an easy-to-use API with which to write their own applications or simple macros.
The COM API has been used by Diamond Head Software to create the Diamond View application with which users fax and view documents managed by DOCS Open from PC DOCS.

ENVELOPE SPECIFICATION

The Envelope Specification is a "file-drop" API, whereby an application locates the file or files to be faxed, as well as the fax destination details, in a specific directory within the fax queue service. The fax queue service retrieves the Envelope, or file containing the fax destination details, and the attachments, or files to be faxed, and packages these together for delivery to the FAXCOM Server.

SMTP

Biscom’s SMTP Fax Gateway allows users and applications to send faxes generated via SMTP mail. Mail messages are addressed using the T.37 standard for fax delivery via SMTP, for example: FAX=1-978-250-4449@aspfax.ma.biscom.com. The body of the e-mail message and any attachments are converted to TIFF and delivered via fax. A completion status message is returned via e-mail.