Sending documents as attachments from Outlook
For the first time in a long time, faxing options in Office 2003 have gained renewed prominence. The most obvious addition has been the provision of fee based Internet faxing services allowing users to fax Office documents over the Internet. Documents sent through this service are first sent as attachments to an e-mail message to a fax service provider. The service provider then sends the document via analog modem and phone line to the fax number specified by the user--for a fee, of course. Modem faxing is still around too. It was essentially ignored in this development cycle, receiving a minor improvement to its interface in Word but losing some functionality in Outlook.
The first clue most users will have that there are now two different options for faxing is when they invoke the “Send To >” flyout in Word. There they will see both “Recipient using Internet Fax Service…” and “Recipient using a Fax modem…”
The first time a user selects the “Send To > Recipient using Internet Fax Service…” option they will be prompted to sign up for an account with one of the providers who has been anointed to integrate with Office 2003. At the time of RTM only the Venali Fax Service (http://www.venali.com/solutions/microsoft/index.asp ) was available. Other providers have been added since release, but only Venali participated in the beta and was available for testing for this review. How well the other providers work is anyone’s guess.
Once an account is established and activated, then the “Send To Recipient using Internet Fax Service…” option will bring up a modified Outlook new message form that will allow the user to specify the fax number to which the document should go, then convert and send the document as a TIF file attached to an e-mail message to the fax service provider. From there the fax will be sent via modem to the recipient. This message form will also allow the user to select from among three cover pages which will comprise the body of the message. Unfortunately these cover pages will not pick up sender and recipient information automatically and must be populated manually each time. If no cover page is selected, the body of the message can be used to create a note to send along with the office document. There is also a handy utility on this form to let you see what the cost of your transmission will be. Once the fax service has sent your fax, it sends a confirmation to your email address when the fax has been delivered. (It’s been quite a while since we’ve had fax confirmations routed to our Outlook Inbox since the Windows XP Fax Service no longer supports that feature.)
Outlook 2003 must be installed for the Internet Fax Service to work. Although the document to be faxed is sent in a standard e-mail message, it cannot be sent using any other e-mail client. Microsoft claims that they must use a custom Outlook message form to do some behind the scenes checking to prevent identity spoofing. There are several methods by which to send faxes over the Internet Fax Service. The first four methods listed here describe various ways to send from various office applications which invoke the custom Outlook form I’ve mentioned. The last method discusses sending the fax directly from Outlook.
Direct Entry of Fax Recipient information
After invoking the Internet Fax Service from the “Send To” menu of Office applications, recipient names and fax numbers can be entered directly into their respective fields on the first line of the form. Once a fax has been sent to a recipient using this method, the recipient’s name is added to Outlook’s autocompletion cache and is stored in the following format:
FirstName LastName < 12345678999@venali.net >
Typing the first letter of a name into the “Fax Recipient:” box on the form will bring up a list of suggested names from Outlook’s autocompletion cache, just as it does for email in Outlook 2003. For any recipient to whom you’ve already sent an Internet Fax, that name will appear on the list in the unique format described above and can be entered by clicking on the name in the list or by simply hitting Enter or by tabbing out of the field (as long as the correct name on the list is highlighted). The Fax Recipient/Phone Number fields on the form will then be populated automatically and both the fax should succeed. Be aware, however, that the suggested names list may also contain autoresolution matches for modem Fax Recipients from the Outlook Address Book. Autoresolution matches can be distinguished from autocompletion matches. Autoresolution entries will appear in the same format as the Display Name in the Outlook Address Book, i.e., Name (Home or Business or Other Fax) rather than the unique autocompletion format described above. One reason it is important to make this distinction is that selecting an autoresolution match from the list may cause some unexpected behavior (see “Autoresolution” below). Another reason it is helpful to distinguish Internet fax recipients from modem fax recipients in the autocompletion suggested names list is that selecting the correct recipient type is an easy way to invoke the correct fax transport on the fly when faxing from Outlook or from other applications that do not have the “Send To > Recipient using Internet Fax Service…”option (see “Sending from Outlook” below).
Recipients can be selected directly from the Outlook Address Book by clicking on the Address Book icon in the Toolbar. When selecting a fax recipient with this method, a new “To:” field appears on the form containing the recipient name and fax number in this format: FirstName LastName <12345678999@venali.net>. The Fax Recipient/Phone Number fields on the form are not populated, however, as they are when using autocompletion. Nevertheless, sending of the fax will succeed as long as the Contact Record for the fax recipient contains the phone number in a valid format (canonical or Outlook’s standard 10 digit masking). One-off or other non-standard phone formats will not succeed (the fax request will still be sent by Outlook to the Internet Fax Service, but the Internet Fax Service will be unable to send the message and will return this error message “Reason for failure: Destination is incorrect or blocked”).
If you start typing a name in the Fax Recipient field and there are no autocompletion matches or there is an autocompletion match which you do not want to use and you click out of the field or hit Esc (rather than hitting Tab or Enter) you then invoke autoresolution (automatic name checking). With autoresolution, you will encounter one of several scenarios:
In Outlook 2003, the New > Internet Fax command on the toolbar is used to access the Internet Fax Service. Once a user has established an Internet Fax account, this command will open the same custom Outlook form used by other Office applications to collect the document and recipient information and send it to Venali. The form has one modification, however. It has a line that allows the selection of attachments. In theory, this option opens the door for sending a lot more than just Office
Documents and may prove to be the most useful feature of this new fax service. Many users long ago abandoned their fax machines in favor of their PC’s, but frequently find themselves faced with the necessity of faxing paper documents. Venali has been struggling to accommodate these other attachment types, and appears to have done so just as the product was released.
What’s missing in the final version, however, is the ability for users to send a simple text message as an Internet fax. Prior to RTM, users could simply type a text message into the body of Outlook’s New > Internet Fax form and the message would be faxed to the recipient. Now, however, this method generates an error message: “error code 211. Reason for failure: message does not contain any attachments.” To send a typed Internet fax message from Outlook users are now required to use one of the three cover pages provided with the Internet Fax Service before a message will succeed. However, when sending an attachment the message body can still be used to send a text message along with the document without the necessity of using a cover page. One workaround for this problem is to create a blank cover page for the Internet Fax Service (i.e., a blank Word Template) and place it in the Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates\1033\Fax folder. If you do create your own cover sheet, be aware that it won’t be listed in the Cover page listbox. Once you select it using the Custom… button it will continue as the default from then on.
Sending documents as attachments to a fax message from Outlook had mixed results in beta versions. At the last minute there were some improvements that we assume will carry over to the released product. Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents all succeed. Access reports do not. (Note that Access also does not support sending its files to the Internet Fax Service in its “Send To” menu.) Office document attachments to an Outlook message to an Internet Fax recipient are converted to TIF files automatically by Microsoft Office Document Imaging (after you acknowledge a warning that the document is being converted to an image). The message/fax request is then submitted to Venali and is sent successfully. In earlier builds, PowerPoint attachments to an Outlook message failed with this method.
The feature I suspect users will find the most useful only started to work in the last build: the ability to fax attachments that are not Office Documents, such as a scanned paper document (usually a TIF file). That feature is and will remain the most frequent reason many people still need faxing capability in this era of electronic data transfer. It remains to be seen how well the fax service providers can accommodate this need. In earlier versions, any attachment that was not a Word or Excel document would fail with a very odd error messages such as: “Destination is not a fax machine.” Even if you tried to outsmart Venali by manually converting the image attachment to its native TIF format the message would fail, but that failure notice would take hours to appear: “Message contains attachments of unknown type.” There were many improvements in the final build I tested, however. The following non-Office file types succeeded when attached to a new Internet Fax message from Outlook : JPG, GIF, BMP, and TIF. I am also told that PDF attachments will be supported. How reliably this feature will work remains to be seen. Single PDF files seem to succeed. When more than one is attached, however, the first in the queue gets stripped out. Go figure.
If you have problems sending TIF files as attachments, there is another trick you can try thanks to Office 2003’s improved Microsoft Office Document Imaging application (MODI). Most scanning applications can create TIF files natively. For those that can’t, most image files that can be opened in the Windows Picture and Fax viewer can be readily converted to TIF files by that application. Once Office 2003 is installed, TIF files open by default in MODI. All a savvy user needs to do is create a TIF file, open it in MODI and use MODI’s “Send To > Fax Recipient Using Internet Fax Service…” command to get the job done.
Outlook users can also access the Internet Fax Service in another way by simply using the same format for an e-mail address that the Venali Internet Fax Service uses for fax requests: 12345678999@venali.net . Any Outlook New Mail message that has an 11digit number followed by @venali.net in the “To:” field will submit a valid fax request to the Venali Fax Service. You can even create an “Internet Fax Contact” record by entering 12345678999@venali.net in the e-mail address field (not fax number field) of a new Contact Record. Any message sent to this Contact address will also submit a valid fax request to Venali. Fax messages created in this fashion do not permit access to the Internet Fax Service’s Cover Pages and do not have the separate line to allow selection of attachments. Files can still be attached to these messages, however, with the usual methods (Insert > File) and in the final version many attachment types seemed to be rendered and transmitted correctly by Venali. This method is particularly useful to send Internet Faxes from applications that do not have the “Send To > Recipient Using Internet Fax Service…” command. Be aware, however, that sending a graphic file with the standard New message form instead of the special form designed for Internet Fax, may fail to invoke MODI to convert the file to TIF format. These fax requests will fail but it will take a long time (several hours) for you to be notified of the failure with this obtuse error message: “error code: 114. Reason for failure: Invalid password or invalid ticket.”
Probably the biggest advantage to creating “Internet Fax Contacts” with the email address in 1234567899@venali.net format is that it enables users to create a fax merge using the Internet Fax Service. Since these messages are sent from Outlook, however, it will first be necessary to create a blank cover page and set it as the default as described above. Once you do, you can then set up your merge document in Word then complete the merge to electronic mail using the email field containing the address in 1234567899@venali.net format. The merge message will appear on the blank cover page and will be sent to each recipient successfully by the Internet Fax Service. As an added bonus, graphics embedded in these merge documents are sent in their proper positions and proportions, something that has never occurred in merges to modem fax services (see below).
Depending on what type of account you establish with the Internet Fax Service provider, you can also have an assigned in-bound fax number to receive faxes. That number will usually be a number within your local area code, although for some reason the one they assigned to me still requires long distance dialing within my own area code. Faxes received to your number are rendered as TIF attachments and sent as an e-mail to your Outlook Inbox. (It’s also been a long time since faxes could be received in your Outlook Inbox, although that was always a popular feature.)
Faxing through a local analog fax modem is still supported in Office 2003 as long as you’re running Windows 2000 Personal Fax or Windows XP Fax. Outlook 2003 integrates with these two services in the same way it did in Outlook 2002, but it is not necessary to integrate with Outlook to use either of these modem faxing services since neither is MAPI dependent. Integrating Windows 2000 Fax with Outlook 2003 remains the laborious chore it was with Outlook 2002. Integrating Windows XP Fax is easier.
Faxing a Word document is straightforward in Office 2003. “Send To > Recipient using a Fax modem…” is pretty self explanatory and should keep most users from heading down the wrong path to “Send To > Recipient using Internet Fax Service...” The former option only exists in Word and Outlook, however. In Excel only the Internet Fax Service is available and in Access no fax option exists in the Send To menu. In Word, the “Send to > Recipient using a fax modem” option launches the venerable Fax Wizard which mercifully has finally been updated so that it actually functions again. In the last two versions of Word, this Fax Wizard would wander off in search of its dear departed friend, Microsoft Fax (from Windows 95/98), leaving us all wondering why it was even still around and what it was supposed to do. Now it is able to recognize and invoke the Win 2K or XP fax services. It also lets the user choose a third party fax program. Curiously, it now designates Win 2K or XP Fax as “Microsoft Fax” which is a bit confusing for users who recognize that term as referring to the old program in Windows 95/98. When “Microsoft Fax” is chosen in this Wizard, we now get to skip the long and involved Word Fax Cover Page Configuration dialog and are simply handed off to the “Send Fax Wizard” for either the Win 2K or Win XP Fax Service. There we can access either the Outlook or Windows Address Book depending on how those fax services are configured. Cover page selection is handled by those respective fax programs and the fax is sent off with no fuss. If a different fax program or a printer is chosen, only is the user given the option of using Word’s Cover Page Configuration Wizard. Another bit of confusion is that the Win 2K and Win XP Fax Services also appear in the dropdown for “other” fax programs. Users who are accustomed to the need to use that option as they did in Office XP may head down that path instead of selecting the now unfamiliar “Microsoft Fax.” There appears to be no penalty if they do so, however, since users are still spared the dead-end of the Word Fax Cover Page Wizard and are handed off to the Win2K/XP Send Fax Wizard.
Printing to the Fax Printer remains a preferred option for faxing from Office 2003 since it leaves rendering tasks to the originating application rather than leaving the fax service to choke on it. This option will invoke the Win 2K or Win XP Send Fax Wizard just as it did with Office XP and allow selection of a fax recipient from their respective address books.
Sending attachments remains a popular option since the Windows XP Fax Wizard does not support that option. Unfortunately, it has become more of a hit or miss proposition in Office 2003. Most document types that have a printto verb defined will work, but for some reason TIF files now fail as attachments in Outlook 2003 RTM. Sending TIF files as attachments is an increasingly popular feature for users who need to fax a paper document since most scanning software generates TIF files. In Office 2003, the task rendering of TIF files has been changed from the Windows Picture and Fax viewer to the Microsoft Office Document Imaging application (MODI), presumably to accommodate the Internet Fax Service. But no matter how one defines the printto verb for TIF files these transmissions fail. Curiously, the file is sent instead to the operating system’s default printer but the message from Outlook fails with a “failure to render” NDR. There are three workarounds I’ve found so far. First is to insert the TIF file as a picture in an Outlook message, but with this method only the first page of a multi-page TIF can be sent. A better alternative is to open a multi-page TIF in MODI and use the Print to Fax command from there, as described above. The final method is the best, but has not yet been tested extensively. For some reason in Office 2003, the file associations for “.tif” and “.tiff” have been changed to MSPaper.Document. It is the printto verb for MSPaper.Document that must be either created or changed in [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MSPaper.Document\shell\printto\command] to:
rundll32.exe <Drive>:\WINDOWS\system32\shimgvw.dll,ImageView_PrintTo /pt "%1" "%2" "%3" "%4"
Once that is done, TIF attachments are rendered and sent from Outlook without a problem. So far I’ve seen no regression in any other Office functions by adding this verb. Even the Internet Fax Service still seems to work correctly.
Other file types vary in how they can be sent as attachments from Outlook. HTML files will invoke the Print dialog before they can be sent, requiring additional user intervention. Their printto verb is usually:
rundll32.exe <Drive>:\WINDOWS\System32\mshtml.dll,PrintHTML "%1" "%2" "%3" "%4"
JPEG, GIF, and BMP files seem to succeed without additional user intervention. They take forever to transmit because every image is rendered separately as a full page. Even a 5KB JPEG will take over 10 minutes to transmit. They all use the same printto verb:
rundll32.exe <Drive>:\WINDOWS\System32\shimgvw.dll,ImageView_PrintTo /pt "%1" "%2" "%3" "%4"
Sending from Office applications remains essentially unchanged from Office XP. As long as integration of the fax service with Outlook has been established, faxes can still be sent using the “Send To > Mail Recipient” or “Send To > Mail Recipient (As Attachment)” options. The latter is preferred if the document has formatting, although Word documents seem to retain most of their formatting even without the attachment designation in Win XP since the messages are sent in HTML format by default. These faxes will go out through Outlook so cover page options must be selected within the properties of the Fax Mail Transport in Outlook, not the cover page options of the Fax Service. Also, with Win XP fax, sent and received faxes still reside in the Fax Console, even if sent through Outlook. Several other old quirks from previous version of Outlook remain: Population of the Outlook Cover Page seems to be another hit or miss proposition, depending on which Fax Service is used. Recipient information is populated on the cover page but not Sender information with Windows 2000 Fax. With Windows XP Fax, both seem to be populated pretty consistently. Subjects will appear on the Cover Page, notes will not. Notes will either be inserted at the top of the document (if sent to Mail Recipient) or on a separate page (if sent to Mail Recipient As Attachment).
Fax merges remain the laborious chore they have been in every previous of Office and in fact have become even more cumbersome for those using a PST file as a data source for the merge. As in previous versions of Office users will encounter no “Merge to Fax” option within Word’s Mail Merge Task Pane. Even the “Merge to Fax” button on the Mail Merge Toolbar remains inactive. As in the past, users must instead construct a merge to electronic mail and then must select a fax address that is in the [FAX:555-1212] format. This workaround has been well documented in the Knowledge Base for years: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=289532. Since users do not usually store fax numbers in that format, many have created separate Contacts subfolders to contain these “nonstandard” recipients for fax merges. That’s where things now get ugly. For some reason, Word 2003 is no longer able to access separate Contacts subfolders as a data source for a merge if the folders resides in a PST file (Exchange mailboxes seem to work). Any attempt to do so is met with this error message: “This operation cannot be completed because of dialog or database engine failures. Please try again later.” A Contacts Subfolder can only be used if the merge is started from the Outlook Contacts Subfolder instead of from Word. However, users also need to be aware that if they start the merge from Outlook, the Mail Merge Task Pane in Word will not permit completion of the merge (it will contain no merge to electronic mail option). The Mail Merge Task Pane should simply be dismissed and the Mail Merge Toolbar used instead to complete the merge to electronic mail.
There is another trick to simplify fax merges that I have always liked. It is not supported by Microsoft, but it has always worked for me without any problem. A “Merge to Fax” option will appear in the Mail Merge Task Pane and the Merge to Fax button on the Toolbar will become activated by ensuring that the following lines are contained in the win.ini file:
[Mail]
MAPI=1
MAPIX=1
and that the Windows directory contains a file called MSMAIL.INI with the following lines:
[EFax Transport]
LocalFax=1
These are obviously throwbacks to the days of Windows 3.1 and are a reminder of just how antiquated and in need of updating these old fax transports are. Another of the longstanding limitations of fax merges to modem faxing persists in this version as well. Any graphic included in a merge document is stripped out, blown up to full page size and sent on a separate page as a huge file that can take up to half an hour to send. Nice.
Many of us have thought for a long time that faxing was going the way of the dinosaur, but users keep proving us wrong. The demand for faxing remains high and most fax users remain frustrated with Office’s implementation of faxing. It is clear that Microsoft recognizes that demand and has given faxing a higher profile and provided users more options for faxing in Office 2003. The addition of Internet Faxing is a laudable effort. It is too bad that it received the only the attention in Office 2003, leaving modem faxing now solidly in the role of the ugly stepsister.