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Why you need a fax server
Faxing manually is out of date. A professional fax server solution saves your company substantial costs, while also improving your customer service and image. The benefits over manual faxing are:
- Send faxes at the click of a button instead of having to print out every fax, carry it to the fax machine, wait for your turn, and possibly wait for it to retry when the number is busy
- Store fax numbers centrally in one phonebook, eliminating the need to search for a fax number
- Send faxes that are more legible and of better quality, since they are sent directly from your
PC, using high-resolution techniques
- Automatically route incoming faxes to the right recipient as soon as they are received. This ensures timely and secure delivery of documents
- Track fax activity, by archiving faxes and using call accounting
- Make sure that only you can view your outgoing and incoming faxes
- Send faxes in the same way as you send email
- Automatically retry fax numbers if they are busy
- Easily send faxes to groups of people.
These benefits translate into significant cost savings.
The future of computer-based fax is as an add-on to an email infrastructure. The existing email infrastructure is ideal to integrate fax. Apart from offering administration ease, it is also much easier for users. Users already check their email inbox and are already familiar with sending and receiving emails: Integrating the fax server with email makes the sending and receiving of faxes a natural extension to email and is therefore much easier for the user. In this way, the user has no learning curve while retaining one inbox to check, one address book to store both email and fax numbers, and so on.
Faxes are received directly in the email client
Advantages include the following:
- Users do not need to learn a separate application to send and receive faxes
- Users can check faxes from their email client
- If your email server has web based access, then users can check faxes via the web too
- Users do not need to switch to a separate program to send a fax
- Less administration because administrators do not need to administer a separate fax user database
- Administrators receive less support requests from users
- Because the fax server does not have a proprietary communication system, there is less network overhead and less cause for errors
- Application integration through the mail 'Send' command in desktop packages
- Easy to install as fax server is specifically designed for the mail server.
In a nutshell: Network faxing must be email integrated!
Nowadays, most fax servers offer email integration. However, with many fax servers, this is simply ?tacked on? - meaning heyt still maintain their own proprietary database system, their own proprietary user databases and so on. Look for a fax server that integrates natively with your mail server, either using an Exchange Connector or via the SMTP/POP3 protocol.
Look for minimal administration
An important consideration when choosing a fax server is to take into account the amount of administration the software will require. A high maintenance fax server software might lead to the software not being used, or take time away from other important tasks. Therefore, it is essential to insist on features that reduce administration, such as:
1. Complete integration with Active Directory (even if you are not yet running Windows 2000, invest in a solution that is ready for it). Integration with Active Directory should simply use Active Directory directly and not have its own user database; it is advisable not to select a solution that retrieves and synchronizes users.
2. Rules-based interface. It is important that you can take a rules approach: This way you can apply rules - for example, inbound routing or a cover page - to groups of users and save on administration time.
3. Try not to choose products that modify the Active Directory schema more than necessary. If a fax server adds extra 'tabs' to user settings in Active Directory, then the schema is modified. Note that this can filter down to other domains or cause headaches when upgrading to newer Windows versions or installing service packs. Try to avoid such fax solutions.
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