Patent Grant
8970880
This patent application claims the benefit of priority under 35 U.S.C. 119(e) of U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 61/421,850, filed Dec. 10, 2010, entitled “SYSTEM, METHOD AND COMPUTER PROGRAM PRODUCT FOR MULTI-TENANT FACSIMILE SERVER,” which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
This application relates in general to methods and systems for serving facsimiles, and more particularly, to methods, systems, and computer program products implementing a multi-tenant architecture in a facsimile server.
Fax servers typically include a device equipped with one or more modems, fax boards, emulators for Fax over IP (e.g., T.38 emulators). Fax servers receive documents from users, convert the documents into faxes and transmit the documents as faxes. Fax servers can also receive faxes and store the incoming faxes in a repository or forward the faxes to users (e.g., via email or other messaging mechanism). In general, previous fax servers were single tenant fax servers serving a single client organization. In single tenancy architecture, vendors or servers typically provide a single physical infrastructure, database and application per customer.
Example embodiments relate to systems, a computer program product with executable portions.
Embodiments disclosed herein provide methods and systems for providing a multitenant facsimile server. One embodiment can comprise a non-transitory computer readable medium storing a set of computer instructions. The computer instructions may be executable to maintain a set of entity information, wherein the entity information defines a plurality of tenants. The instructions may be further executable to maintain a database configured to store transmitted and received fax documents corresponding to a plurality of tenants. The computer instructions may be further executable to receive a facsimile document at the fax server, wherein the facsimile document comprises one of a document to be transmitted or a received fax. The computer instructions may additionally be executable to identify a tenant associated with the document based on an identifier. Further, the computer instructions may be executable to store the document in the database, wherein the document is associated with the tenant in the database.
In one embodiment, the facsimile document is a document received from a user to be transmitted. The computer instructions are further executable to perform the steps of identifying the user associated with the facsimile document, identifying the tenant associated with the user and applying one or more settings based on the tenant associated with the user when faxing the facsimile document.
According to one embodiment, each of the plurality of tenants has a corresponding fax number and the facsimile document has metadata containing the fax number. The tenant may be identified based on the fax number metadata. In another example embodiment, the identifier associated with each of the tenants is a domain name, with each tenant associated with a different domain name.
According to one embodiment, each of the tenants may be associated with a plurality of users and each of the tenants shares system resources of the facsimile server.
The drawings accompanying and forming part of this specification are included to depict certain aspects of the invention. A clearer conception of the systems and methods will become more readily apparent by referring to the exemplary, and therefore non-limiting, embodiments illustrated in the drawings, wherein identical reference numerals designate the same components. The embodiments may be better understood by reference to one or more of these drawings in combination with the description presented herein. It should be noted that the features illustrated in the drawings are not necessarily drawn to scale.
The various features and advantageous details thereof of various embodiments are explained more fully with reference to the accompanying drawings and detailed in the following description. Descriptions of well known starting materials, processing techniques, components and equipment are omitted so as not to unnecessarily obscure the embodiments in detail. It should be understood, however, that the detailed description and the specific examples, while indicating preferred embodiments, are given by way of illustration only and not by way of limitation. Various substitutions, modifications, additions and/or rearrangements within the spirit and/or scope of the underlying embodiments will become apparent to those skilled in the art from this disclosure.
As used herein, the terms “comprises,” “comprising,” “includes,” “including,” “has,” “having” or any other variation thereof, are intended to cover a non-exclusive inclusion. For example, a process, product, article, or apparatus that comprises a list of elements is not necessarily limited to only those elements but may include other elements not expressly listed or inherent to such process, article, or apparatus. Further, unless expressly stated to the contrary, “or” refers to an inclusive or and not to an exclusive or. For example, a condition A or B is satisfied by any one of the following: A is true (or present) and B is false (or not present), A is false (or not present) and B is true (or present), and both A and B are true (or present).
Additionally, any examples or illustrations given herein are not to be regarded in any way as restrictions on, limits to, or express definitions of, any term or terms with which they are utilized. Instead these examples or illustrations are to be regarded as being described with respect to one particular embodiment and as illustrative only. Those of ordinary skill in the art will appreciate that any term or terms with which these examples or illustrations are utilized encompass other embodiments as well as implementations and adaptations thereof which may or may not be given therewith or elsewhere in the specification and all such embodiments are intended to be included within the scope of that term or terms. Language designating such non-limiting examples and illustrations includes, but is not limited to: “for example,” “for instance,” “e.g.,” “in one embodiment,” and the like.
Embodiments described herein provide a multi-tenant fax server. Within a multitenant architecture, a software application may be designed to virtually partition its data and configurations. Accordingly, a plurality of tenants may share or utilize a central resource, such as computing resources or an application, while retaining security control of data and settings between tenants.
Multitenancy may allow for multiple tenants to share or utilize networking resources or applications at a single fax server, thus reducing the need for redundant resources to serve multiple customers. By allowing a plurality of tenants to utilize or share the resources of the fax server, costs associating with operating a plurality of fax servers for each tenant may be reduced or limited.
Fax server 120 can include fax boards or emulators to communicate with fax machine 130 via fax-over-IP or PBX or other facsimile transport technology. The fax server 120 may operate with a multitenant architecture and support a plurality of tenants, clients and/or devices. Fax server 120 may include a repository 135, such as a SQL database, and a file system 137 for storing images documents and/or mailboxes associated with each tenant.
Network 125 may be a LAN, WAN or other network. According to one embodiment, network 125 can include the Internet such that fax server 120 provides an Internet accessible service. Communication between server 120 and other devices may occur using cabled or wireless networking.
In operation, fax server 120 receives documents (a document may be used as a container for any type of digital content, including facsimiles, voice messages, videos, word processing documents, spreadsheets, and any other type of media including multimedia) from client devices 102 and routes or transports the documents to an appropriate destination, including converting the document to a facsimile document and sending the facsimile to a destination fax machine 130. Additionally, fax server 120 may receive facsimiles, convert the facsimiles into documents and forward the documents to client devices 102 or store the documents in a repository.
Fax server 120 can store a fax server program 180 on a non-transitory storage medium (e.g., HD 155, RAM 150, optical disk, floppy disk, cartridge or other non-transitory storage medium). Fax server 120 can maintain a repository, including databases of information 135 internal or external to fax server 120 and a file system 137 for storing files. Files can be stored with related metadata including, but not limited to the user that submitted the document or to which the document is directed etc.
The document can be forwarded to a fax board, emulator or other transport by the fax transport 330. According to one embodiment, fax transport 330 can be a universal document transport DocTrans module as described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/634,267, which is hereby fully incorporated by reference herein. Fax transport 330 may communicate with hardware for sending and receiving faxes via, for example, cards or internet protocol address. According to one embodiment, documents communicated to the fax transporter 330 may be XML or TIFF.
As part of sending a document, fax transport 330 can apply dialing or routing rules to determine how fax server 120 is to transport or route a document. As an example, dialing or routing rules may indicate that a document that is sent at a specific time or is from a particular application is to be sent using a specific document transport. Example transports include fax boards (e.g., from Brooktrout, Eicon, Intel, etc.), SMS devices, routers for T.38 fax, email, T.37 fax, a DocPlus provider, virtual implementation of the above including document transmission simulations and so forth.
The fax transport 330 selects a target based on the applied dialing and routing rules. As example, fax transport 330 may select a public service telephone network (“PSTN”), another fax server, a board server containing one or more communications devices and so forth. As examples, the fax transport 330 may select a target based metadata, type of document or other attributes relating to the document.
In the opposite direction, fax transport 330 can receive faxes from the fax machine 335 and write each page to a file as each page is received from the fax machine 335. Once all the pages are received by the fax transport 330 from the fax machine 335 and written, the pages are read by the fax transport 330 and a multipage image is created by the fax transport 330. Fax transport 330 can forward the multipage image to server component 325, which can place the multipage image in repository 320. A client application or client device 305 may access the multi-page image through API 315, and the server component 325 may communicate the document to a client by email or any other mechanism.
Fax server 120 can further include a workflow engine 340 that manages the workflows of incoming and outgoing faxes and a file system API 345 to access the file system 350 for reading and writing files. Workflow engine 430 may also include a database API 355 for reading to and writing from repository 320.
According to one embodiment, fax server 120 may support a multi-tenant system in which client devices/applications/users associated with multiple tenants may send or receive documents through the same fax server. To support the multi-tenant architecture, repository 320 and file system 350 may be divided into multiple tenant repositories/file systems. This can be achieved according to any mechanism known or developed in the art. According to one embodiment, a single repository/file system is maintained and metadata is used to associate each document, record or other information with a particular defined tenant. In another embodiment, logically or physically separate databases and/or file systems may be used to store data for each tenant. Thus, documents in repository 320 or file system 350 can be associated with particular tenants. Fax server 120 can prevent access to documents associated with one tenant by users/devices associated with another tenant.
According to one embodiment, fax server 120 can store sets of entity information 360 defining various entities known to fax server 120, such a human users, devices, groups, tenants or other entities. Entity information 360 can include tenant information 357. Tenant information 357 can include, for example, a tenant ID, an associated customer name, settings for documents sent by the tenant (e.g., cover sheet settings, routing and dialing rules) and other settings. According to one embodiment, fax server 120 can allocate specific in-bound and out-bound facsimile numbers to each tenant. Thus, whenever a document is received by fax server 120 from a particular tenant for faxing, fax server 120 can route the document to an appropriate out bound fax line. Similarly, whenever a fax is received on a particular fax line (or directed to a particular fax number) fax server 120 can associate the received fax with the appropriate tenant.
Entity information 360 can further include owner information 365. Owner information 365 may include information associated with a person, device, application that may send documents to and receive documents from fax server 120. Each owner can be assigned or have associated with it various configuration setting including a fax number, password, identification or other information. Furthermore, each owner can be associated with a particular defined tenant.
Entity information 360 can include settings for configuration information, dialing rules, routing rules and other information that can be applied to any type of entity. If entities are organized in a hierarchical fashion, one entity may inherit settings from entities above it in the hierarchy (e.g., a user may inherit from a group and a group from a tenant). Configuration settings may include, for example, the type of cover sheet to apply to a fax, notification information, encryption settings. Routing and dialing rules specify parameters for routing a document to another fax server or transport (e.g., email) or for dialing and sending a facsimile. Thus, for example, a dialing or routing rule may specify that documents associated with a particular tenant must be sent on a predefined fax line(s) or from predefined number(s).
As another example, dialing or routing rules may indicate that a document that is to be sent at a specific time or is from a particular user is to be sent using a specific document transport. Dialing or routing rules can be applied based on information pertaining to the document, such as phone number, document transport, tenant, owner (e.g., user, device, application), etc.
As yet another example, fax server 120 can be configured such that a workflow engine processes a document differently depending on the owner, tenant or other entity. Fax server 120 may also limit access to documents based on the owner, tenant or other entity.
Files can be stored with related metadata 375 that may travel with the fax document. For example, the metadata may be related with an identifier of a sending and/or receiving devices, such as domain name, fax number, or any other identifier. The metadata 375, or other information, may be processed by the fax server 120 to identify the tenant or tenants associated with the communicated document so that the appropriate settings may be applied.
According to one embodiment, fax server 120 may maintain entity information as a hierarchy of entities in the fax server system. Each facsimile document processed by fax server 120 can be associated with one or more of the entities (e.g., through use of file metadata).
The tenants 455 represent the entities for which fax server 120 is providing the fax server service. If a fax server is being used by multiple corporations, for example, each corporation may be considered a tenant. Information between different tenants may not be shared. The tenants 455 may be associated with a unique or distinctive identifier (as compared to other tenants), such as an internet protocol address, fax number(s), domain name(s), email domain name(s), or user identifications to allow documents received from destined for particular tenants to be identified.
Owners 465 are the entities that, from the perspective of fax server 120, are the recipients of or senders of facsimiles utilizing a client device, MFP, or any other device configurable to send or receive facsimiles. Accordingly, any number of types of owners 465 can be defined. According to one embodiment, the owner types can include human users (referred to as users), multi-function printers (MFP) and applications. Each of these owners can be considered to be on the same level of the hierarchy such that, for example, MFPs and applications are peers to users.
According to one embodiment, information for entities can be stored in tables, such as database tables.
Data structure 525 provides information for each tenant. Data structure 525 may store a name for each tenant, a unique identification for that tenant, a particular cover sheet applicable the tenant, etc. Other top level or tenant level information may also be stored in the tenant table. For example, the identification information such as a domain name, a fax number, or any other identifier may be associated with the tenant id.
When a document is received, the fax server can process information received with the document to identify the user, group, tenants or other entities associated with the document and apply configuration settings, routing and dialing rules or other settings accordingly. As an example, upon receiving a document from a particular user, the fax server may determine that the user is associated with Tenant 001. Based on the profile information for Tenant 001, the fax server can determine that it should send the document from a particular fax number and should apply a specified cover sheet style to the fax.
Upon a tenant registering for a fax server 120, the fax server 120 may assign the tenant a corresponding fax number and storage in the database. The database may be used as a mailbox to store received faxes and/or faxes waiting to be transmitted associated with the tenant. Further, the database may be allocated, partitioned, split or divided among a plurality of tenants in the multi-tenant architecture, or the database may be assigned to only the tenant.
At S605 a user may be registered with the fax server 120 and associated with the tenant. The profile of a user at the fax server 120 may include a variety of information. As one example, a profile for an MFP 110 may include settings for a coversheet. As another example, receipt notification settings can be configured. A receipt notification may request that a notification be send to an email address associated with the profile of the MFP 110, or printed on by the MFP 110. As another example, confirmation notification settings may be established for the user. A confirmation notification request may be an update corresponding to the status of the transmitted document. For example, the profile of a user may be configured to require an update of the transmitted document based on if the document was received, was not received, is waiting to be received by the fax server 120.
In S610, the fax server 120 may receive a fax corresponding with a tenant. The fax may include metadata corresponding to a sender and/or recipient of the fax document, such as a destination fax number or other identifier associated with a tenant.
In S620, the fax server may determine to which tenant to route the fax based on an identifier. More specifically, the fax server 120 may determine a corresponding entry for the tenant in a database based on the metadata associated with the received fax. For example, fax server 120 may determine that a fax is destined for Tenant 001 based on the fax number to which the fax was sent.
In S630, the fax server 120 may apply routing rules, mailbox rules, and/or configuration settings associated the determined tenant. For example, the fax server 120 may store the received fax in an inbox associated with the tenant.
According to one embodiment, each user associated with the tenant may view the database entry and the corresponding mailbox of the tenant at a fax server via an interface at a client device. However, because each document at the fax server supporting a multi-tenant architecture may correspond with a specific tenant, users may only view the received faxes corresponding to the tenant with which the user is associated. The fax server can enforce security rules to prevent users from accessing documents associated with other tenants.
In S640, the steps of
In S720, the fax server 120 may determine the tenant with which the document is associated. More specifically, the fax server 120 may determine a corresponding entry for the tenant in a database based on the metadata associated with the received document. For example, fax server 120 may determine that the document was submitted by a user associated with Tenant 001 based on the user name, IP address of the device submitting the document, domain name from which the document was received or to which it was submitted or other information.
In S730, the fax server 120 may apply routing rules, mailbox rules, and/or configuration settings associated the determined tenant. For example, the fax server 120 may store the received fax in an outbox associated with the tenant, may apply a cover sheet specified for the tenant, may send the document to a destination from a fax number associated with the tenant or apply other settings. Again, fax server 120 may apply security rules such that only users associated with a particular tenant may access documents associated with the tenant.
In S740, the steps of
The above-described multi-tenant architecture allows a fax server and hence phone lines/hardware resources be shared among multiple tenants. Another advantage of the multi-tenant architecture thus described is the built-in isolation of data below the tenant layer. To illustrate, an administrator in a single-tenant system would have access to the entire population of users served by the system. However, an administrator for one of the tenants in a multi-tenant system could only administer users associated with that particular tenant. Thus, each tenant may separately administer its data on a shared hardware platform.
In the description herein, numerous specific details are provided, such as examples of components and/or methods, to provide a thorough understanding of embodiments of the invention. One skilled in the relevant art will recognize, however, that an embodiment may be able to be practiced without one or more of the specific details, or with other apparatus, systems, assemblies, methods, components, materials, parts, and/or the like. In other instances, well-known structures, components, systems, materials, or operations are not specifically shown or described in detail to avoid obscuring aspects of embodiments of the invention. While the embodiments may be illustrated by using a particular embodiment, this is not and does not limit the invention to any particular embodiment and a person of ordinary skill in the art will recognize that additional embodiments are readily understandable and are a part of this invention.
Any suitable programming language can be used to implement the routines, methods or programs of embodiments of the invention described herein, including C, C++, Java, assembly language, etc. Different programming techniques can be employed such as procedural or object oriented. Any particular routine can execute on a single computer processing device or multiple computer processing devices, a single computer processor or multiple computer processors. Data may be stored in a single storage medium or distributed through multiple storage mediums, and may reside in a single database or multiple databases (or other data storage techniques). Although the steps, operations, or computations may be presented in a specific order, this order may be changed in different embodiments. In some embodiments, to the extent multiple steps are shown as sequential in this specification, some combination of such steps in alternative embodiments may be performed at the same time. The sequence of operations described herein can be interrupted, suspended, or otherwise controlled by another process, such as an operating system, kernel, etc. The routines can operate in an operating system environment or as stand-alone routines. Functions, routines, methods, steps and operations described herein can be performed in hardware, software, firmware or any combination thereof.
Embodiments described herein can be implemented in the form of control logic in software or hardware or a combination of both. The control logic may be stored in an information storage medium, such as a computer-readable medium, as a plurality of instructions adapted to direct an information processing device to perform a set of steps disclosed in the various embodiments.
It will also be appreciated that one or more of the elements depicted in the drawings/figures can also be implemented in a more separated or integrated manner, or even removed or rendered as inoperable in certain cases, as is useful in accordance with a particular application. Additionally, any signal arrows in the drawings/figures should be considered only as exemplary, and not limiting, unless otherwise specifically noted. The components can be implemented as portions of a program, objects, and modules or according to any suitable software architecture. The components may be distributed across multiple machines.
Benefits, other advantages, and solutions to problems have been described above with regard to specific embodiments. However, the benefits, advantages, solutions to problems, and any component(s) that may cause any benefit, advantage, or solution to occur or become more pronounced are not to be construed as a critical, required, or essential feature or component.
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