Well, I am no Sandeep, but he and I both have the Mainpine. I think you are looking at the wrong perspective.
First, let's talk about fax servers and walk up fax machines. Every office has got to have a walk up fax. You have to have the capability of taking plain paper and going to a fax machine and faxing. Sure, you could scan and then send through Mainpine, but that would be a little silly and time consuming. Depending on your quality of fax machine, you will have a fax modem that will pretty much handle all of your needs. It can be set to route faxes in PDFs to where you want it to go, again, with the right machine. It needs to be a network fax machine. You will likely be faxing at 33.6. Now can individual clients fax to that machine? Yes and no. The fax machine would have to have a fax server and software for it to be able to do that. We used the Muratec (the best value of fax machines and MFCs) with a fax server and had a great GUI on the clients.
Now, if you decide you want to have a better fax server with better ECC error correction that, and this is the key, integrates into the Windows Server and uses the fax role, then you need a fax board. It is hard to explain why it is better. $500 vs $35 should get you close. You will drop less calls, more faxes will go through, support will be infinitely better than with a U.S. Robotics modem. There are firmware updates, etc.
There is a reason many EMRs incorporate the Mainpine board into their EMR. eMDs, eClinical works, etc.
Yes, it is compatible with Windows 2008. It is compatible with SBS 2008, and if one is compatible, the other is. I would never purchase one without doing it over the phone. While some modems offer the following, they can't do it at the same level at the Mainpine or my former Brooktrout. But, here is a great feature of a fax board. Say, you have two ports like me instead of the one port like Sandeep, you can seet up the ports like this. Port 1: Outbound and inbound, Port 2 inbound. The software will see an inbound coming in but it normally would continue to ring until it timed out if you were sending, But, the board is smart enough to send that fax over to Port 2, which will ALWAYS send. Or it can be set up so one port is out and one port is in.
This is why you write down what you want to do and get support to install it. Yes, Sandeep will tell you how. We can both remote in and set it up. But, since the support is free for life, why not let them set it up. Quicker, perfect. Another advantage is that Windows Fax and Scan integrates with the Mainpine. One thing I always tell people which I find to be the most important part of client to fax server faxing. The GUI. If the fax software on the client is not intuitive and as JBS says in his tag line, less clicks, then it is useless. We leased a rather expensive (very expensive) Toshibe with a fax server, but the client software sucked. They kept arguing with me until they came over and couldn't even send a fax. Most walkup faxd machines utilize poor GUIs. It's like the scheduler in a billing software. eMedware: great billing software, developers must have made the scheduler during lunch. Same with Toshiba. Incredible MFC, horrible client program. Muratec good, don't know about Xerox yet as we haven't paid for the $200 fax server. But, Microsoft FINALLY got the software right.
Mainpine now has an Internet fax. I am sure it is better than Ring Central, etc.
So, there you go. I would say that a fax server on your fax machine is a very good addition to your practice. An employee has a two piece fax or even a 100 piece fax and bam it is out the door with full tracking. But, you have to have the walkup.
Finally, the ability to route the fax to a folder on your server, you can route it to a 3rd party software as well.
Finally, external fax servers can be very effective. Castelle, GFI, etc. But, they just aren't the same, and they can be fairly complicated.
