So we are on the verge of purchasing a 3300 for our new office building, and asked our Mitel vendor about fax solutions. What they said has me wondering about their competence. They claim you need a standalone 3rd party server (they recommend Castell) with either analog or T-1 trunk interfaces through which the Mitel forwards calls to fax numbers for the fax server to answer then forward the message to the Exchange server for inputting into Outlook inbox. They said Mitel is coming out with a unified messaging but cannot fax out yet. This seems completely bogus to me. An IP device accepts calls on the PSTN TDM trunks, extracts the call data string, and forwards the packets to an IP device sitting on your desktop. Why the heck can't it detect a fax and forward that directly to Exchange via SMTP? It seems this would be ridiculously simple to do in software. I can't believe we need T-1 interfaces between the Mitel and fax server. Can anyone explain this, or give recommendations on how they are doing it? We do need to be able to fax out from the desktop as well as receive faxes to their Exchange inbox.
thanks
Hal