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By C. Roy Payne
Is the fax dead? Not yet. Perhaps not ever. The fax is being redefined today, and new technologies are enabling people to send faxes without a physical fax machine, but the fax itself is not dead.
Fax machines became a part of the workplace in the 1970s as a revolutionary means for getting documents from point A to point B. This might seem old-fashioned in the 21st century. With the proliferation of the Internet and e-mail today, most documents can be sent over equally long or greater distances even in a shorter amount of time.
Despite this, fax remains the de facto standard in many businesses for sending forms, records and documents between various parties. It’s still used largely for contracts, purchase orders, shipping confirmations, résumés, invoices, non-disclosure agreements, employment forms, benefits and health care forms, proposals, tax filings, banking records, insurance claims ... and the list goes on.
For businesses that rely heavily on inbound and/or outbound faxes, there’s certainly no need to kill the fax. But in today’s greener, less-paper, highly regulated business environment, there are better faxing methods and technologies available to you to prevent you from wasting another second at that old standalone fax machine. At AccuImage, we don’t want you to set out to change your reliance on faxing, just the way you handle your faxes.
This issue of The AccuView focuses on the benefits of bringing your faxing technology out of the 1970s and into the 21st century, and the features commonly found in fax server solutions. Interested in learning more? Please call us at 615.242.7226.
Best regards,
C. Roy Payne
roy.payne@accuimagellc.com
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This Month’s Topic: Managing Faxes
An Overview of Fax Document Management
Fax documents are essential to a range of key business processes across industries – in critical functional areas such as purchasing, finance, human resources, legal and sales. As of 2008, Davidson Consulting, a market research firm, estimates there are still more than 130 million fax machines worldwide sending more than 80 billion faxes each year. This huge installed base of fax machines is a dominant force that requires intelligent fax technology to play a central role in document management. This article describes how.
Fax Server Features and Benefits
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. This article provides a comprehensive explanation of the features and benefits of employing fax server technology.
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Professional Services for Fax Solutions
This issue of The AccuView focuses on solutions for better managing your faxes – using electronic document methods and fax server software. But while we discuss the ease of implementing and using these solutions in this newsletter, we know that a successful business solution is not always built on “plug-and-play” software. A successful fax solution, for instance, requires knowledge of telephony protocols like FoIP (see the “Tech Tip” for an explanation) and cabling experience, knowledge of how to connect new software with existing software and hardware, and oftentimes, the development of customized software components.
This is where the AccuImage professional services team comes in. We employ a highly-skilled and experienced professional services staff – people like Allen Stroud who is profiled in this month’s “Meet and Greet” – dedicated to professionally crafting and implementing solutions that achieve tangible results for all AccuImage customers. Our team is committed to understanding your business needs and providing customization and installation services to satisfy your unique requirements.
We’ve installed many fax server solutions over the years, and our professional services team is highly knowledgeable and experienced in the hardware, software and telecom components needed to run this type of solution. There’s no need to embark on a project like this, or any imaging or business process management project, on your own. That’s why we’re here! For more information about our professional services, please call 615.242.7226.
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AccuImage Represented at Hands On Nashville
On Saturday, September 26th, John Bybee, account executive, represented AccuImage at Hands On Nashville Day. Over 1,200 volunteers participated in the event, generating one of the largest turnouts in Hands On Nashville Day’s 18-year history.
The volunteers donated approximately 5,000 hours of their time – the equivalent of more than $100,000 in labor – to landscaping, painting and cleaning projects at 49 Metro Nashville Public Schools. Metro Schools provided materials for the projects: 1,200 gallons of paint, 1,056 brushes, 350 yards of mulch, 44 wheelbarrows, 215 shovels, 108 rakes and 210 pairs of gloves. John was part of a painting crew at one of the middle schools, slinging a paint brush like a pro. Well done Nashville!
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Allen Stroud, Business Systems Analyst
This month’s featured employee has a background atypical for someone in his line of work. Before beginning his career in software support and development, Allen Stroud traveled the country playing lead guitar for a variety of well-known country music acts.
Once he decided to give up life on the road, Allen began to sharpen his skills as a software developer working for several manufacturing groups before coming on board with AccuImage in 2004. For the past five years, Allen has worked as a business systems analyst and leads our development team in designing and building custom software solutions for our customers. Allen’s knowledge, experience and dedication in delivering customized solutions allow us to provide extra value to our customers.
Allen enjoys spending his spare time with his wife and children, running and, of course, music!
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Fax Servers for Improved Document Handling
Sending, receiving and storing faxes is not unlike the handling required for other paper documents, but there are additional challenges. Employees may not be immediately aware of faxed documents that have been received, and may thus make decisions or provide service based on old or incomplete information. Incoming and outgoing faxes may sit on fax machines, leaving them open to mishandling and confidentiality breaches. In addition, there may be missing or overlapping pages, requiring manual follow-up. Periodically, a company may receive notification that a fax was not received at all. If the paper source is depleted, the “fax not received” message may not reach the recipient, and the sender may remain a mystery.
By integrating a robust fax server solution with your document management, line-of-business and/or back-office applications, you gain the ability to capture faxes electronically, eliminate paper and ink, verify that every page of a fax has been received, and make the content immediately (and securely) available to everyone who needs it. Storing faxes in a document management or similar system ensures that an organization has access to all of its business information, not just the electronically stored paper documents.
A fax server solution typically consists of software and telecom components, which may include VoIP/FoIP, seamlessly integrated with your existing systems and line-of-business applications.
Are you ready to implement a fax server solution that will improve fax storage and accessibility, increase employee productivity, reduce costs, decrease manual handling and ensure compliance? Great! AccuImage can help you determine the fax solution that’s best for your business and your existing applications and processes. Please call AccuImage at 615.242.7226 for a consultation.
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Now Featuring: Open Text Fax Server, RightFax
Rethinking Fax?
If your image of faxing is a standalone machine digesting paper documents with excruciating slowness, we’ve got great news! Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition (formerly Captaris RightFax) automates both inbound and outbound faxing and integrates with your existing systems to provide powerful electronic document delivery capabilities that reach beyond traditional faxing.
Open Text Fax Server enables organizations to distribute nearly any document from any application, using a central server integrated in the company network. The software enables users to send and receive documents directly from any desktop application. And it works with virtually any back-office application to automate the delivery of business-critical documents such as invoices, purchase orders and statements.
Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition ...
- Cuts document delivery costs by up to 90%. It eliminates the need for multiple standalone fax machines, modems and telephone lines as well as the labor, printing, postage and supply costs necessary for manual faxing or mailing.
- Improves productivity. Employees no longer waste time waiting for a fax machine. They can send documents directly from their desktop, e-mail or any business application.
- Increases security and internal/external compliance. Government regulations have made safeguarding information and keeping accurate records more critical than ever. The fax server provides tamper-resistant document delivery and a complete audit trail for each document. It also offers encrypted or certified delivery options for added protection.
- Reduces administration and maintenance costs. It enables administrators to consolidate all fax services on the existing enterprise network. And centralized, easy-to-use tools make ongoing administration simple.
Key Benefits of Fax Server 9.4
Reduces Costs
Streamlines Installation and Deployment
Simplifies User Adoption
Eases System Management Tasks for IT
Improves Integration with Other Systems
Eases Fax Management for End Users
Offers Enhanced Reporting Capabilities
Increases Support for VoIP/FoIP Fail Over
Improves OCR Performance
For more information about Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition, call AccuImage at 615.242.7226.
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What is FoIP?
Fax over Internet Protocol (FoIP), or IP faxing, has been around for years. If you’ve ever sent a fax from a computer, you’ve used a form of FoIP. Basically, FoIP is a method of sending faxes over the Internet. FoIP changes the transmission medium of faxing in much the same way that VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) changes the transmission medium of a phone call. In both cases, data makes all or most of the trip between sending and receiving devices on a packet-switched network (the Internet), avoiding the long-distance phone lines of the circuit-switched telephone network. This reduces the cost of transmission and can be a more efficient setup for a business that already has access to Internet bandwidth.
The “IP” in FoIP stands for Internet Protocol, which is the series of standards and steps used to transmit data over the Internet to the correct destination address. The fax information is transmitted as “IP packets” via the Internet instead of as analog signals via phone lines. An IP packet is simply a chunk of data organized in a way that lets Internet routers and destination machines understand and decode what’s inside it. When you’re transmitting a fax between two IP fax machines, the transmission cost is the same as for e-mail, and it’s faster because transmission is entirely via broadband channels.
FoIP is a common component in fax solutions. To speak with a technical specialist at AccuImage about your faxing needs and discover why FoIP may be a good option for you, call 615.242.7226.
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What We’ve Seen and Heard
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.”
- The Kauffman Group
Labor savings from using fax server software alone in a large company can exceed $100,000 a year.
- Davidson Consulting
Traditionally, manual faxing was the solution employed by most businesses where speed of delivery and the need for delivery receipts were required. Manual fax achieved this but at a cost: it has always been time-consuming for employees and therefore an inefficient way of sending large volumes of documents. There was also the risk that confidential documents would end up sitting in a publicly accessible fax machine or that they would go astray on their way to the intended recipient.
- Lane Telecommunications
Hundreds of companies worldwide, including the entire Fortune 100, use Open Text Fax Server.
Windows 7 became available on October 22nd. Please contact us to inquire about compatibility and support with your existing hardware and software.
AccuImage End of Support Schedule
www.accuimagellc.com/eos.html
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