Premiere Global supports both the Caller ID feature and the Transmitting ID feature. In the fax world there are two types of Identifiers, the Transmitting Subscriber Identification (TSID) and the Called Subscriber Identification (CSID). The CSID is what shows up on your Caller ID display telling you who is calling you, while the TSID is what shows up on your fax machine and is intended to identify the fax machine that is calling and while they could be the same, most often they are different.You may ask why does this matter? A big difference between these two features is that the CSID is controlled by the phone company and cannot easily be changed, the TSID however is controlled by the person who owns the fax machine and can be easily altered. The TSID field can be 20 alpha numeric digits and is programmed by the person who sets up the fax machine for the first time. Unfortunately the majority of fax machines being used today are not properly programmed to identify themselves or they utilize a generic name like “Fax Machine”, because of this you cannot develop special rules based on the sender. When you are able to receive the CSID field you can do some very special things that you just cannot do if you are only receiving the TSID.
If you are able to receive the CSID, and are receiving your faxes via email, you could route a fax to a specific call center, route the fax to a customized business process or even set special alerts when faxes come from premium customers, and this can be accomplished without using any Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Software. Unfortunately not all fax providers make it easy for you to determine if you are in fact receiving the TSID or the CSID, so make sure you know what you are getting and how you will be using this valuable feature. In my next article I will explain how you can use the Caller ID (CSID) to block Spam Faxes and keep your mailbox from getting cluttered.
Tags: Desktop Fax, Document Delivery
Interesting concept.
Don’t most fax broadcast vendors including Premiere Global omit the CSID?
Most vendors use “unknown” and do not include the CSID when dialing outbound faxes, this can create issues for the receiver, especially if they block “unknown” callers. PGI does use different CSID when dialing depending on the service and the features you subscribe to.
Your terms are confusing, because CSID (when referred to a fax machine) is data that is transmitted during a fax call, this is programmed by the user either in the software, or the fax machine itself. Usually, the CSID is set as the actual fax number being used eg. (777)555-1212 or a short text message like company name like “FAXBACK CORP.” The CSID is the information that is displayed on fax devices only when someone calls you and is sending a fax to you, and in most cases when you also send a fax. Some machines have the ability to also enter something called the TSID, which is basically the same thing, but it appears only when you SEND a fax to someone else. If your machine has both options, you can set two different id’s for sending and receiving faxes. For machines with only the ability to enter a CSID, that applies for both sending and receiving.
TSID and CSID in regards to faxing, has nothing to do with the caller id (CID) that appears from your phone company. Caller ID in most cases cannot be changed by the user on demand (at least not so easily), so if your fax line is (555)-123-4567 and you send a fax to someone who subscribes to caller id service, the recipient will see your REAL Caller ID+Caller ID Name that phone # is registered to, + on the received fax, your fax CSID or fax TSID (which is programmed by you)
CSID and TSID is just a programmable caller id system designed for Fax Machine communication only. CID is the information programmed for your phone or fax line.
GF,
Depending on your region, you may know the Caller ID (CID) as many different things, such as CID, CSID or CNID. You may also know the Fax Machine Identifier as TSID or CSID.
I can appreciate the confusion around the different acronyms.
CID = Caller Identification (Caller ID)
CNID = Calling Number Identification
CSID = Call Subscriber Identification
TSID = Transmitting subscriber identifier
Going forward to avoid confusion, I will not use any acronyms. While PGS already allowed users to set the fax machine identifier, we will be modifying our Fax2Mail service to pass the Fax2Mail number instead of a generic fax number as the Caller ID. As you indicated, this feature exists to identify the fax line, our service will now show the fax number you are using via PGS as the Caller ID.
We feel that this feature combined with our fax tone recognition (where we play a wav instead of fax tone if we do not detect fax tone on a number we have dialed – we also allow the recipient to terminate the call and block future calls), is a very powerful combination not currently seen in the market place.
Frank Toscano