flexfax: XML-F application-to-fax interface

[Phil Watkinson <pkw@elgro.co.uk>]

Hi,

Most of us will now have seen or heard of the press release from RedHat and
VSI about porting a commercial network fax solution to RedHat Linux 6.0. If
you've missed it the URL is :


http://www.newsalert.com/bin/story?StoryId=Cn4vZWbKbytaWmZ

In amongst the annoying marketing jargon is a reference to XML-F which is a
XML standard for applications to interface with fax servers. 

It is a common problem to try to extract information from applications, such
as purchase orders, remittance advices, and feed it into HylaFAX for faxing.
I have ended up writing complicated perl scripts to parse out phone numbers
and whatnot from text files and attempting to build up command lines for
sendfax. And it's a royal pain.

Now we are never going to get the Oracles, SAP, Peoplesoft, even the Sages
(a popular accounts package in the UK) to write to the HylaFAX protocol, but
they may use a XML protocol if they think it will be a generally accepted 
standard (and they think it will sell them more software).

I think this XML-F could be useful, and I would be interested to know whether
other people think so as well. 

There are more details, including a readable white paper in pdf format at :

    http://www.vsi.com/xml-f/

Regards,
Phil Watkinson,
Boston, UK.