ICTFax Version 3.0 , A Fax over IP Solution , released now

Aatif Riaz

We are pleased to announce that ICTFAX Version 3.0 is released. New release completely removes Plivo Framework from ICTFAX. Now ICTFAX no longer depends on Plivo for communication with FreeSWITCH. Instead, ICTCore has been introduced as a new lightweight communication library. ICTFAX uses ICTCore to communicate with FreeSWITCH. Apart from this major change, other features that are included in this release includes GUI based trunk provider configuration, multiple trunks allowed, documentation converted to markdown syntax, attachement file name with spaces issue has been fixed, error on retry issue fixed along with other minor bugs.

ICTCore Communication Library

ICTFAX now uses ICTCore for communication with FreeSWITCH. ICTCore is specifically built to provide reliable communication between ICTFAX and FreeSWITCH. It is developed using the object-oriented principles. Previously, Plivo framework was unable to cope with communication issues and was unable to provide a reliable connection between ICTFAX and FreeSWITCH.

Main reason to abandon Plivo framework from ICTFAX was that Plivo was not specifically built for faxing and we were using it with adhoc modification to work it for ICTFAX. That solution worked initially but later, due to no real intention from the open source community of Plivo to include fax support in it, we realized that there sould be a communication library with built-in fax support along with voice communication for FreeSWITCH. Hence, ICTCore is the solution with voice and fax communication support for FreeSWITCH. It provides easy to use API for developers to build complex fax and voice applications.

Additional Features

Other ICTFAX features that includes in this release is GUI based trunk provider configuration. In older versions, trunk configuration was done in two steps. First, an xml file was created in FreeSWTICH profiles directory manually. Then in second step, a new Trunk provider entry was created for this xml file in the GUI. Now, only one step is enough to configure trunk. No xml file is created. Just enter the trunk settings in GUI and xml file is created automatically.

Documentation has also been converted to markdown syntax that is easy to manage. Attachement file name with spaces issue has also been fixed. An old issue with retry is also fixed along with other minor bugs in new release.

ICTFAX: http://www.ictfax.org
Download Link (Github): https://github.com/ictinnovations/ictfax
Download Link (Sourceforge): https://sourceforge.net/projects/ictfax/