In a recent blog I railed against fax marketing. Hey, why not?  Faxes are a dying application, going the way of cassettes and CRT TVs and I'd had a hard day so I need to take my frustrations out on something feeble and outdated.  Plus who likes unsolicited marketing?  (other than marketers)  So fax marketing seemed like a perfect target for a healthy rant.

But the next day, I felt much better.  But I realized I may have been too quick to discount fax technology.  As a directed means of communication, faxes have some major benefits over email.  Here are some handy fax facts: 

• they are secure and hard to fraudulently modify; though the technology exists to make emails secure and legally acceptable for signatures, etc. (like PHP, Voltage, et al – hey, here’s one that claims to provide secure email certificates FREE for personal use;  http://www.comodo.com/products/certificate_services/email_certificate.html )
• they’re not easy to handle for small businesses or individuals. Also, the scanner is built right in. And, they don’t require a PC or even an internet connection.
• facsimile is decades-old technology so it’s not high tech and it’s easy to use.

One downside, compared to email , is that each fax costs money - not tons, but the paper and ink or toner gets used up and you have to replace it. That's in addition to the cost of the phone call. From an environmental standpoint, faxes require you to print each fax out (wasting paper) just in order to determine if it is of interest. Even if a fax is junk, it still costs you consumables and time.

Another downside is that, while it’s secure while in transmission (it’s less likely that a hacker is tapping your fax phone line than they are sniffing your computer network) it’s not secure when the printed page is sitting there in the “in” hopper waiting for you to grab it. This is particularly important to business subject to HIPAA (healthcare), SOX (business and financial), and other regulated security standards.

Fax Servers Anyone?
An excellent alternative to fax machines are fax servers.  You can get fax software that runs on your own computer – your Mac and PC come with basic fax software, and there’s the venerable WinFax Pro and many others, some even free – but that’s not, by definition, a server. A fax server allows anyone on your network to access it as a shared resource. Fax server software names include RightFax, LightningFax, and FaxMaker, and they run on your Windows (or other fine brand) server. Then there are standalone fax server appliances like FaxFinder, FaxPress, and FaxBack; these don’t typically require a server – they’re just hardware-in-a-box with a modem and an ethernet port. Finally, there are Internet-based fax services like eFax which, for a monthly fee plus a per-fax charge, will send your faxes and will provide a fax phone number to accept your faxes.

However you work it, you get to send faxes from your computer's desktop. Anything you can print can be faxed. And you get to RECEIVE faxes on your computer, too. Some deliver the inbound faxes as email attachments and some have “client” software that lists the faxes much as you see your emails. The beauty of all this is that

• inbound faxes are not printed until necessary, letting you delete the junk without printing it. In fact, as one step toward a paperless office, you may never have to print a fax – even a good one – again since you can just save it as a file or an email
• inbound faxes are not seen except by the receptionist and you (see my comment below about “DIDs”)
• outbound faxes are never seen except by you and the recipient
• outbound faxes don’t have to be printed first (i.e., to fax a spreadsheet over a traditional fax machine, you must print it, then feed it into the fax machine, then recycle that piece of paper, thus being less than “green” and costing consumables)
• outbound faxes to multiple recipients can be prepared and issued at once without having to spend the time to resend to each recipient
• outbound faxes can be scheduled. This way a fax blast can go out when phone lines and less busy and thus not hold up time sensitive faxes
• both directions no longer cause a walk to, or a wait at the fax machine – incoming or outgoing faxes can be sent by all users at the same time
  

The main downside is that physical items have to be made digital first. If you have a page with a signature or a photo, or if you have a newspaper item you grabbed from today’s edition, you can just stick it in a fax machine. With a fax server you must scan it first.

Fax Security
What if you have an office with a bunch of people, all getting faxes, many of them of a private nature? If you have one phone line coming in to the fax server, then SOMEONE, the receptionist typically, must view all received faxes then forward them to the intended recipient. This is insecure and time consuming. But, a neat telephone company service called DID (Direct Inward Dialing) lets you have a whole “block” of phone numbers and yet pay for only one or two lines and lines are where the cost is. Now, everyone gets their own fax phone number and when a fax comes into the server via a DID line, the DID digits arriving with it tell the server to whom the fax should be directed. This eliminates the middleman. We’ll talk more about DID in another posting.

Fax Servers are one fairly inexpensive way to get your operation more efficient and integrated and secure.As usual, please share questions or experiences.