Fax server software can dramatically enhance productivity and reduce costs while streamlining processes and improving the quality, security and timeliness of document automation. If your organization is still employing standalone fax machines to fax important business information, it’s wasting time and money and is way behind current fax technology. Fax server software does the job more quickly and efficiently, allowing your employees to be more productive while allowing you to address regulatory concerns and provide customers a higher level of service. It also does the job more securely and accurately.
A fax server processes inbound and outbound faxes and stores them on the server. Among other functions, it can track fax history, add fax billing codes, route incoming faxes to group or individual fax or e-mail inboxes, provide cover sheets, supply fax notifications and broadcast fax. Today’s fax servers also integrate with imaging, document management, workflow and other applications to automate the delivery of faxes. Such back-office automated document delivery provides an electronic method to cost-effectively exchange information with customers and suppliers via fax, e-mail or over the Internet.
Fax and Document Delivery Benefits
Implementing fax server software for document delivery has countless benefits.
Reduced Cost. The use of fax server software generally reduces the number of phone lines in a company and ensures least-cost routing of faxes, which makes lower telephone bills the norm where it is put into use. In addition, it provides significant savings by eliminating the labor, printing, postage, equipment and supply costs associated with manual faxing or mailing of documents.
Improved Business Processes. By integrating document delivery capabilities with business applications, fax server software allows businesses to streamline and automate routing processes and transform the way in which they communicate and disseminate information to customers, suppliers and business partners.
Improved Productivity. By providing e-mail faxing, desktop faxing and automated delivery of documents from back-office applications, organizations that implement fax server software can reduce time-consuming manual processes. Your employees do not have to waste time in line at a fax machine waiting to send or receive documents. Instead, they can conveniently fax right at their desktop or automatically from key business applications.
Secure and Reliable Delivery. Fax servers integrate faxing and document delivery capabilities with your business applications, eliminating the need to worry about lost or missing faxes. Users can send and receive documents directly at their desktops, or large batches of documents can be faxed automatically and unattended from back-office applications to eliminate error-prone manual routines. In addition, fax server software takes advantage of the latest computer security features and provides options such as encrypted or certified delivery to ensure privacy protection.
Regulatory Compliance. Regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act are designed to enforce accountability, eliminate fraud and protect the security of personal information. Fax servers centralize communications and can automate the delivery of documents as well as provide electronic tracking and storage. As a result, fax servers are an easy way to support compliance with mandates addressing the way organizations receive, process, use, store, protect and share fax data.
Reduced Administration and Maintenance. Fax server software allows administrators to consolidate faxing services on the network. Administrators do not need to waste time dealing with multiple fax modems, phone lines or standalone fax machines. Centralized and easy-to-use administration tools making ongoing administration simple.
Fax Servers: Do You Need One?
Do you need a fax server? According to Maury Kauffman, managing partner of The Kauffman Group, if a 25-person organization manually faxes just 30 two-page documents daily, it’s squandering 1,000 man-hours a year. “That equates to one employee spending six months each year printing documents and feeding fax machines,” explains Kauffman. Another industry expert, Peter Davidson of Davidson Consulting, calculates that labor savings from using fax server software alone in a large company can exceed $100,000 a year. In addition, companies that use fax servers to automate delivery of high-volume, batch-oriented documents can reduce document delivery costs by more than 50 percent.
The numbers above are impressive if you think about the number of documents that go through your business every day. And they don’t even take into account the cost of buying fax machines, toner, paper and fax machine repairs. Nor do they take into account the incalculable cost of even one vitally important fax that is lost or misplaced.
Will your organization benefit from using fax server software for document delivery? Most businesses with more than 25 employees sending faxes probably need fax server technology; those with more than 50 employees definitely do.
Fax Server Features
When looking for a fax server software solution, there are some important features to consider.
Fax and E-mail Integration. Fax and e-mail integration is vitally important because people already communicate extensively via e-mail. Your solution needs to integrate fax with the e-mail program your employees already use. They should be able to fax from within the application and receive fax documents as attachments to e-mail messages.
Integration with Back-Office Applications. Your fax server investment will be best leveraged if you look for a solution that has proven and reliable integrations with all the applications you use to run your business. Does the vendor have strong partnerships and tested integrations with leading e-mail, CRM, document management and imaging applications as well as with MFPs? Does your fax server take advantage of technologies that make it easy to integrate with your business systems?
System Security. Since many fax communications contain confidential information, you want to ensure that your company’s fax documents are safe from prying eyes both in-house and externally. All fax server products promise security, but you should make certain that passwords cannot be read in plain text and that password lists are inaccessible to other users. Ask about additional safeguards to ensure that a fax cannot be delivered to the wrong number. Ask if the fax server provides options to send documents as encrypted files or certified e-mail to ensure the confidentiality of important communications. Also, check to see if the administrator can control access to billing codes.
Single Fax Server Platform. Your fax server should give you long-term value and provide a platform for all of your document delivery and receipt needs. Can it provide convenient desktop faxing capabilities as well as automate delivery and receipt of back-office documents? Does it integrate easily with your line-of-business applications? Is it robust enough to handle multiple users?
Document Faxing. All desktop faxing systems can fax almost anything that resides on the desktop computer. But what if a user needs to fax another document and wants to maintain formatting, graphics or signatures? Can you fax a variety of file formats? Make certain the faxing software you are considering supports more than message faxing.
Cost Recovery. If the fax server software you are contemplating integrates with popular document management systems, work done by your employees can be automatically assigned billing codes with time spent tracked and updated automatically. If billing codes are important to the way you do business, check that it includes this feature.
Fax Status and Notifications. If the documents you fax are the lifeblood of your business, you need to be confident that they reach their destinations. Ask what types of fax notification are available with your solution. Can you receive fax status confirmations in your e-mail or back to a host application?
Routing of Faxes. The ideal fax server routes a fax over telephone lines, Internet, intranet and networked environments, and directs incoming faxes to the appropriate desktop without human intervention. Look for flexible inbound routing methods such as direct inward dialing, dual-tone multiple-frequency, caller service identification and OCR, for example.
Multiple Document Delivery Channels. With today’s fax server software, fax should be just one of the methods for document delivery. Does the software allow you to deliver your documents via fax, e-mail or over the Internet? Does your vendor have a plan in place to take advantage of new and expanding document delivery channels as technology evolves?
Data Recognition Tools. Organizations today require business communications in many formats from a variety of desktop and back-office systems. Look for a solution that provides the flexible data recognition tools needed to capture data from virtually any application.
Scalability. Think about your fax server from a perspective of both today and tomorrow. How many people will use it today? How many employees will your organization have five years from now? Companies need a scalable fax server – one that can grow as your company grows.
Easy Administration. Is the fax server program easy to install and maintain? Is backup automatic? Will you have to shut down the fax server to backup or make changes, or will the system run 24x7?
[Source: Open Text]
