10 reasons why fax is still important
Do you wonder why companies still buy fax solutions? In this digital age documents can more easily and more cheaply be sent by email, right? Here is the top 10 reasons why you are wrong.
1.Global coverage and acceptance
Even well into the Internet age, sending and receiving documents via fax is recognized as essential in business communications worldwide. Although Internet-based alternatives do exist, none have managed to overthrow the fax machine. Worldwide there are over one-hundred million fax devices in use today. For a global perspective, click here.
2. Simple
Traditional fax machine design is straightforward and intuitive – feed the pages that you want to send into the machine, enter a fax number, and sit back and wait for the confirmation.
Nowadays fax is as easy as sending an email because a fax server solution allows sending and receiving faxes from any device via email.
3. Traceable
Outgoing faxes generate notifications which are delivered to the sender informing him/her about the status of the fax delivery (sent/failed). A successful notification is only generated when the remote device signals that everything was received and reproduced correctly.
Fax servers go even further since they can be configured to log and archive copies of all inbound and outbound faxes. By integrating multifunctional peripheral devices (MFPs) with a fax server, all of your fax messaging can be logged and archived in a central location, optimizing both administration and security while also providing consistent and professional coversheets for outbound faxes.
4.Legally binding
The intrinsic nature of the T.30 fax protocol, accurately reproducing documents between two remote points, meets the legal requirements of custodianship – that no third party could reasonably intercept and/or make changes to the document between the sender and the receiver. Fax server software often includes support for digital signatures which further ensures the integrity of the fax data.
5. Assured delivery
Unlike with email and mobile text messaging, with faxes the receiving fax machine must acknowledge that the document was received successfully. Your notification is proof that your document has been successfully delivered to the recipient.
6. Ease of integration
Fax servers can be integrated with every office messaging environment either on-premise or in the cloud, including Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino and Novell GroupWise. You may also extend the capabilities of your CRM, ERP and DMS with fax capabilities through fax server connectors. Legacy systems and non-Windows platforms may also interface with fax servers through standardized protocols such as SMTP (email) and Samba (Unix/Linux file and print services).
7. Secure
The T.30 fax protocol is a point-to-point communication system and any malicious attempt to intercept or alter the data will be detected by either the sending or receiving party and ultimately cause the transmission to fail. This is the basis of the “legally binding” nature of faxed contracts and the primary reason why fax technology is still around today.
8. Ubiquitous
By establishing a foothold well before the age of the Internet, fax machines and servers are a ubiquitous technology available to every business and organization throughout the world. Many business processes, such as transferring medical records and financial information, are linked exclusively to fax and have no universally recognized alternative.
9. Fax over IP
Many companies have turned to voice-over-IP technologies. By using this infrastructure for fax-over-IP you save telephony costs by eliminating the public switched telephone network as much possible and using Internet-based least cost routing. Although typically not as fast as modern fax machines and fax cards, fax-over-IP solutions can exist in a virtualized environment with no dependency on hardware. This aligns with the virtualization initiatives being deployed by many organizations today, spurred on by VMware and Microsoft’s Hyper-V technologies.
10. Fax is established
When writers/bloggers make lists of practices and technologies that have reached the end of their usefulness they often mention business cards, newspapers, optical discs and credit cards. And everyone mentions fax machines. Indeed, the humble fax machine as we know it may fade away. But fax as a communication standard for national and international commerce is deeply entrenched and not going anywhere any time soon. People, like organizations, often forget about the importance of fax until there is a telephony glitch or a fax server goes down, then their reliance on the technology comes into sharp focus.