Searching through faxes stored on a server?

[Major_Disaster]

Hello all,

Currently we have a fax-to-email service where all faxes come through to us as email attachments - which we then route into a faxes folder.

However, the faxes come through simply as from "Fax System", with subject along the lines of "Fax ID: 0000123456789 Received from 234567" or "from Unknown"

This works great for us, but its really hard to try to locate a specific fax - having to go trough each email and preview each attachment (the received from number usually doesnt show or is only a partial number).

We will be moving everything to an SBS 2003 server over the summer - will this, or anything else, help us to be able to quickly search through our faxes?

What do other companies do?

Cheers

 

[walnuts]

What format are email attachments?

If the faxes are coming through as PDF attachments then you have number of options. PDF can be indexed by a number of search tools so you could install Windows Search on desktop or I think you can also install PDF IFilter on SBS 2003 server and have ability to search inside PDF attachments when using Outlook Web Access.

 

[Major_Disaster]

That sounds perfect. Yep they come through as PDF's.

So i would install the iFilter on the server, and set it to index an Outlook folder / Regular folder / WSS ? Any links / guides?

Cheers

 

[walnuts]

Can't find guide on how to set this up on a server and work with Exchange 2003 but if possible I would look at just installing Windows Search 4.0 on your desktop.

This page shows searchable file types:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/technicalresources/filetypes.mspx

Make sure you have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your PC, Adobe PDF IFilter will automatically be installed on your PC when you install free Acrobat Reader.

Once you have Windows Search 4.0 installed on your desktop it will index the whole computer and search results will include emails (pulled from local Outlook), pdf etc.

Microsoft Search can be setup on server to work with Sharepoint or Exchange 2003 Webmail/Outlook Web Access. You'll need to find some guides on google but this is a bit harder to setup. This is only useful if you have users accessing Sharepoint or Exchange via Internet Explorer and they want to be able to search within PDF documents.