• Windows XP
• Windows Me
• Windows 2000
• Windows NT
• Windows 98

WinFax Pro 10.0 shatters the idea of truth in advertising. The current version of the king suite of faxing software has many of the user-friendly features that have made WinFax Pro the de facto fax application. However, its box copy makes a few promises the software can't keep, so buyers beware: if you're running Windows XP or Office XP (or both), you're looking for trouble if you purchase this otherwise excellent program.

WinFax Pro is full of features, including a cover page designer, an automated backup manager, a network fax-sharing module, and more. Its interface will be familiar and comfortable to anyone who uses Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. The Message Manager--where you do most of your faxing work--is divided into Outlook-style panes, with several folders that include a receive log, a send log, an outbox, and a wastebasket in the upper left, a list of faxes in the upper right, and a multipurpose pane on the bottom that lets you view details about a fax or take a quick peek at it.

Opening a fax for viewing invokes a viewer applet, which looks like Adobe Acrobat Reader. It comes complete with a pane of thumbnails down the left side for page navigation, with the main document view taking up the larger portion of the screen.

You can compose fax documents in any word processor. To fax them, use the main WinFax Pro interface, a button installed in your Microsoft Word toolbar, or a drag-and-drop desktop icon. WinFax also lets you send faxes as attachments through Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, or Exchange, which is a mysterious feature considering you can send your documents as attachments without WinFax Pro. In any regard, while the feature worked well on a Windows Me machine with Office 2000, it caused errors and crashes on Windows XP.

Other problems surfaced during testing. Faxing directly through Word XP with the toolbar button caused crashes. A "photo quality" mode offered in the send module doesn't come anywhere close to photo quality. Every time we opened Word XP, an error dialog appeared; Symantec's tech support said that it occurred because we didn't have a modem installed. That conversation took place after we'd sent several test faxes through our installed modem.

Cool

I've used winfax Pro at our ex-office, it completely solved all our faxing problems. So we didnt even needed for a fax machine.

The installation was so easy, it detected the hardware, and all I had to do was pressing the next button, and giving some info about our company. Then I changed the role of the machine in the setup menu, to a fax server. And went to the other computers and installed to all of the other machines. ( There may be a way for an automated setup, but I didnt needed so I am not sure of it.) It detected the fax server and installed it. We had 10 machines on our network, and all the installation process took less than an hour.

We configured the server to forward faxes, even i tought it wouldnt work, it worked fine. The faxes from the banks went directly to accountant department, etc...

We entered all of our customer list to winfax, and started to send faxes to them about our new products. It started faxing, and we went to our home. The next day boss asked us which customers received the fax. I thought I should go into the logs, and search for it. But theres a good designed window, you can see who send the fax to who, at what time, you can configure a report and so on ...

When I looked at the documentation, (Its good documented, you can find all the answers,) I was surprised it even has its own macro language. I didnt tried that but I think theres no fax product that you write down macros.

All was better than I accepted. Since that day our secratary is just reading the her book.

In conclusion, I think its nearly the best product that satisfied me.

Don't buy Winfax

Absolutely useless. Causes word to lock. Will not uninstall. Symantec fixes don't work. Hours wasted. Don't buy this product.

Good for average user. Power user beware!

Although I am working around the vast amount of bugs this program carries with it, it does deliver faxes ok. The client/server functionality sucks. The areacode rules are supposed to be set on the server however for some starnage reason they do not work. KB articles on symantecs site only confuse things. HORRIBLE support of this product. I am looking elsewhere for a solution.