Tip of the Month for October 2011

Faxes sent through Vsi-Fax can now be viewed from within Answers

An option for viewing faxes and emails (sent through VSI-Fax) has been added to the Fax Log Viewer in the newest release of Answers (4.2). Answers will check the VSI-Fax archives and allow you to view the cover page and the fax document sent. This will include forms such as order acknowledgements, pick tickets, invoices, quotes, purchase orders, vendor RFQ's, ship date acknowledgement requests, statements, etc.  These documents will be shown in a PDF format, which will allow you to print copies or save a copy elsewhere if desired. Only faxes and emails that were sent through VSI-Fax can be viewed through this new option. The option is available through an icon on the toolbar, the menu bar, and the right-click menu within the Fax Log Viewer.

Included with this new feature is a separate program to purge the archived faxes. VSI-Fax itself does not provide the ability for purging the archived faxes and emails, so Answers provides a program to keep these cleaned up and keeping disk usage at a minimum. The purge program will check your day-end procedures to see what length of time you are keeping other VSI-Fax log files and purge the archives with the same cut-off date. It is suggested that you enable the archive purge to run nightly, so that it will run along with the other VSI-Fax end of day procedures. To enable this program, go to System Management-->Answers Software Maintenance-->Batch Processing Data Entry. Click on the [Daily Tasks] button. Find the Fax Archive Purge program in the list, ensure that it is enabled, and save the program changes using the diskette icon.

Faxes and emails (sent through VSI-Fax) will start being archived as a standard procedure in Answers 4.2. In some cases, various options may have been selected in the VSI-Fax software that allowed faxes and emails to be archived prior to Answers 4.2, but it was not standard procedure to archive faxes. Therefore, you may not have access to view faxes and emails sent prior to installing Answers 4.2 because they were not being archived on your system in the past.