Harcros Timber & Building Supplies Ltd are the UK's leading timber and builders; Merchants with over 200 branches nationwide. Covering a product line of over 50,000 different building materials, Harcros outlets supply goods ranging from timber, bricks and cement, to paint, nails and brushes.

In July 1997, Harcros started looking for a fax solution to integrate into their existing environment. They were using Sendmail as their mail server and Kmail and Outlook Express as their POP3 clients on a UNIX system.

David McDonald, Technical Development Analyst at Harcros: "We evaluated a number of fax solutions and chose GFI FAXmaker for Intranet because it suited our needs best. First of all there are not many products out there that integrate within our environment, and GFI FAXmaker simply offered the best solution at the best price. Also, GFI FAXmaker answered our needs in that we were looking for an easy and straightforward product, without complicated installation and set-up. It took us exactly 10 minutes to get GFI FAXmaker up and running on the server!"

Richard Broadley, Group Data Manager of Harcros, was put in charge of the user side of GFI FAXmaker. Richard: "Our users were amazed that they could send a fax from within their e-mail application!" Richard found the GFI FAXmaker client installation a relatively easy process. "The best thing was that most users could start faxing straight after the server was installed, because they could use GFI FAXmaker's text API. Users just saved their text files in our dedicated directory, and GFI FAXmaker automatically faxed them out."

When asked how Harcros benefits from GFI FAXmaker, Richard answered: "It enables us to have better management of outgoing faxes and of course it is much more convenient to fax from your desktop than having to queue up behind a fax machine!"

Bottom line:

Product: GFI FAXmaker for Intranet 4.1, 250 users
Mail server: Sendmail from MetaInfo
POP3 clients: Kmail and Outlook Express
System: UNIX
Clients: Windows NT/95/3.1/3.11/workgroups

Harcros Timber & Supplies Ltd