Technical Backgrounder
Certification
Retarus is SAP software partner and the interface of the Retarus "Faxolution® for SAP®" fax outsourcing solution has been officially certified by SAP.
Fax backbone infrastructure
The Retarus Faxolution infrastructure has been developed by Retarus. It's technical design stands for outstanding performance, scalability, transactional safety and availability.
Highly available and redundant servers are used for the fax gateway systems receiving the fax jobs. The messages are logged by redundant high-performance IBM DB2 databases running under AIX. The transport of the fax jobs to the fax hardware and of the fax status messages, as well as transactional security, is handled with the IBM MQSeries message protocol.
The fax hardware in place is Brooktrout faxboards with a transfer rate of up to 33.600 baud supporting the most recent V.34 standard. The use of special algorithms permits almost a 100% compatibility to end devices. The current capacity of the Retarus Faxolution infrastructure is approx. 3 million pages per day.
General technical structure
Connection takes place directly via SAP RFC; a permanently available fax service is registered in your SAP system as a function call. You can configure the interval for transmitting fax documents yourself (e.g., every two minutes). If fax jobs are waiting, the function call is activated to transfer them to the Retarus Faxolution infrastructure. The fax jobs are optimized for transmission as soon as they are received by Retarus and are then immediately transmitted according to their SAP priority. The individual transmission states of the fax jobs are reported directly to the corresponding SAP system in real time.
Datacenters and telecommunications infrastructure
The fax infrastructure runs in several different datacenters in Germany, Switzerland and the USA. The datacenters are connected through redundant high performance leased lines. Retarus works closely with various international telecommunication carriers in order to obtain best routes, failover and load balancing. The overall availability of the fax infrastructure over the last five years was more than 99,9995%.
Reliability and security
Retarus Carrier Management
Highly effective carrier-management is one of the biggest benefits of receiving our services. Throughput has been increased by 30%, because we have many thousands of telephone lines through many different telephony providers available for us.
Retarus monitors these individual telephony providers constantly. A loss of line quality is reacted to immediately by shifting the orders to other carrier lines.
Retarus NeverBusy Technology
If the fax infrastructure of the recipient has a smaller capacity than the sender’s, it can lead to delivery problems. When two faxes are sent to a single fax number at the same time, a busy signal results, normally triggering an automatic retry. However, experience shows that despite these automated retransmissions, many of the transmissions still fail.
The NeverBusy Technology from Retarus supports a fast, and above all, a reliable transmission. If several sending orders are sent to the same number, the orders are sent one after the other, in the shortest possible time. This prevents the case of having undeliverable messages.
SAP priorities and settings
SAP priorities
Basically, all SAP priorities are supported by this service. This is especially the case for telefaxes with the SAP priority ‘express’, that are processed prior to all other current orders.
Settings and processing times
If, for some reason, your transaction is not possible at the first attempt, the default setting for retries is ten times. This setting can be adapted specifically to your needs. The processing times are generally dependent on several external factors, such as:
The number of pages per transaction
The speed of the recipient
The availability of the recipient
The quality of the connection to the recipient
The document layout
Busy signal or wrong number
Receiving faxes within the SAP system
The SAP-RFC interface which is used to send out faxes can also be used to receive faxes within your SAP system. Inbound faxes, including the sender’s fax number, are transmitted as PDF documents directly to your SAP-Workplace.
Compatibility
SAP CRM and Microsoft Office
Just like SAP CRM, Faxolution for SAP supports all Microsoft Office formats so that you can simply send a fax campaign directly from SAP CRM. This involves only setting up the campaign, selecting the recipients’ addresses, and providing the letter (in Microsoft Word format, for example). If fonts are used that aren’t found in Microsoft Office, they can be embeded.
Unicode
Unicode is an international standard that assigns a unique number to each character from each language. Information that is not – or only partly – based on the Latin character system, such as Czech, Slovak, Arabic, the Scandinavian languages, Chinese or Japanese characters, may be misinterpreted by many systems and sometimes leads to dramatic display problems. Converting to Unicode solves this problem.
Retarus Faxolution for SAP is fully compatible with Unicode. This simplifies international data exchange, allowing documents and texts to be displayed in the same way without restrictions. The preferred format for documents with Unicode is PDF.
Other file types and formats supported by Retarus
Retarus Faxolution for SAP supports the file types *.doc, *.docx, *.xls and *.xlsx, in addition to the file types *.rtf, *.bmp, *.jpg and *.tif.
Secure connection
The preferred connection between Retarus and the SAP system consists of a Virtual Private Network Link (VPN). The suggested encryption method is AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). Using VPN the participants have to authenticate themselves to access the resources only available to them. VPN uses a mechanism for encryption that encodes the network connection between the VPN participants. In this way, all data could be transmitted tap- and tamper-proof.
The connection via SAP RFC (SAPconnect) from Retarus to the customer's SAP system can take place either directly to your application server or through an SAP router connection. Environments with load-balancing groups are also supported. Retarus Faxolution for SAP is completely transaction-safe by using a minimum 2-stage transaction model on every level, which is additionally secured by firewall rules plus login via username and password on the customer side.
Other security-relevant aspects
The service fulfills the very strict data privacy and protection laws from the EU and Germany and is a “safe harbor” for US data. To ensure the confidentiality of the customer data, we also have a tight contractual framework with our employees.