No, this is not about Microsoft’s latest and greatest, but about SwyxWare. In the same way as Windows 7 technically is a rather small step from Vista, SwyxWare v7.0 is based on the foundation of v6.20.

Tuesday I wrote that we were planning to install v7.0 on our main production system next week. Well, we did it Thursday instead :-) As we expected, our Swyx colleagues immediately found some bugs. I spent the whole Friday hunting and fixing a nasty problem causing wrong “logged off” state to be shown for some SwyxIt! users.

But altogether the update went rather well. After a rather quiet Friday we’ll see how the new version holds up on Monday and the coming week in a real-life environment.

There’s one thing I’d like to share. Until now, SwyxFax and SwyxWare technically were separate products which their own administration tools and configuration store. We finally integrated both in SwyxWare v7.0. Now you only need one setup package including SwyxServer and SwyxFaxServer. All configuration  can be made  SwyxWare Administration. As a side effect we have to migrate the fax configuration into the SwyxWare configuration database. I learned from experience this week that this can take it’s time:

Fax Forwardings

In v6.20 SwyxFax has a forwarding table which defines per fax number what to do with received faxes. Examples:

Fax number 123: Forward fax client of Windows user domain\john.doe

Fax number 471: Forward to email address alice@example.com

Fax number 888: Print on \\printserver\printer47

In v7.0 we kept SwyxWare’s user-centric configuration, i.e. a SwyxWare user now additionally gets fax numbers and can have one or more forwarding definitions. But how to map the old forwardings to SwyxWare users? Configuration wizard finds users for a fax forwarding by checking if the user has assigned the same windows account or uses the email address as voicemail address and assigns the fax number and forwarding in that case. ConfigWizard displays a list of all forwardings which cannot be matched exactly, e.g. because there is no SwyxWare user to derive from the Windows account or email address, or if more than one user matches. You have to define the user in that case.

We had a special configuration here at Swyx where the whole dev/qa staff uses fax on our main server, but a separate server for voice. We therefore had to assign a lot of fax forwardings manually.

Fax documents

Fax documents used to be stored in a folder on the server managed by SwyxFax Server directly. With v7.0 SwyxConfigDatastore manages fax documents and fax server uses the CDS-API to access them. And internally all faxes will be stored as SFF, which takes less space than the old format. SwyxWare configuration Wizard converts all existing fax documents to the new format during update. It’s probably a great opportunity to get rid of old faxes you now longer need before doing the update to v7.0 :-)

I’ll keep you posted about how v7.0 holds up next week and about the date for the beta.

We know that this update/migration might be a pain in certain scenarios, but we had to weigh the time and resources we spend to implement this one-time update process against using the resources for other features.