Fax Server

To understand why fax technology is going to be so strategic – when many people thought it was a dying form of communication – we need to understand how customers are changing the way they manage printing.

Businesses are holding back on investing in new office equipment to save costs – but if you continue to own your fleet of printers, fax machines, scanners and Multi Function Printers (MFPs) there is a limited amount you can do to reduce overall costs.

Print Technologies Enable Cost Savings and Revenue Growth

The pressures to reduce costs, cut carbon footprint and adhere to regulatory compliance are all driving companies towards Managed Print Services (MPS) – whereby the whole printing and copying estate is placed on a single contract covering hardware, consumables and maintenance.

A Managed Print Service (MPS) removes the cost of hardware ownership, takes away any associated staffing responsibility and delivers greater visibility of spending.

Increasingly, software applications are being included in managed print services; to reduce the costs of printing by using mono or duplex devices, increase security and tracking with network authentication or proximity cards and to automate business processes like invoice approval, by integrating scanning and printing with ECM and workflow applications.

Fax is another important consideration for organisations that are considering moving to a managed print service.

Fax continues to be used in banking, healthcare, the legal sector and many other industries for daily, critical communications.

The estimated running cost of a fax machine when you include the capital cost of the device, maintenance, power usage, phone line rental and consumables is a staggering £300 per year!

Customer, Bernard Matthews Farms, told us that for every 4 conventional devices, they need only one MFP

Whilst most MFPs have the ability to send and receive faxes, they rely on an analogue phone line or an Internet connection with a third party fax service.

Whilst this may suffice for the basic job of sending a fax, the ability to integrate fax into other applications (MS Office, MS Outlook, ERP, CRM, ECM) is limited as is the ability to provide an electronic tracking which can be integrated into the overall printing, scanning and copying audit-trail.

Furthermore, many companies have now deployed Voice over IP (VoIP) or intend to in the future, with the goal of dramatically reducing their telephony costs by moving voice traffic onto the data network and eliminating analogue lines. Enabling analogue fax cards on Multi-Function devices does not fit in with this strategy.

Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition allows users to send faxes from the front-panel of the Multi-function device by simply logging in, selecting the fax option and entering the number.

• The fax is sent across the network to Open Text Fax Server where it interprets the sending user, applies a coversheet and transmits the document to its destination
• The user is notified in email of a successful send, retries or undelivered faxes
• Inbound faxes can be routed directly to the nearest device and stored until the user enters their credentials
• Alternatively, they can be routed directly to the user’s email inbox
• Fax Server supports a wide range of vendors including Canon, HP, Konica-Minolta, Ricoh, Sharp and Xerox

There are a number of additional benefits to be gained by implementing a Fax Server as part of your managed print services

• Improved productivity (reducing the time it takes to send, receive and distribute faxes)
• Reduced call costs by using your IP network to transmit faxes for some or all of the journey
• Reduced administration by using a single virtualised IP fax server which can support all offices on the IP network and increased visibility of fax usage

It is therefore easy to understand why the demand for Fax Servers is increasing. MFPs have gone a long way to unify the print, fax, copy and scan functionality.  Cutting the number of fax machines, printers etc. by replacing them with a MFP, will dramatically reduce energy consumption (computers, printers, fax machines and copiers consume energy even while they are not in use) and being ‘greener and leaner’ in this way will ultimately add to the bottom line.

… And you do not need to convert IP voice calls into old style analogue calls to do this!

Paul Bamberger, Technical Consultant at Avanquest ProcessFlows recounts a recent conversation he had on the train with  a senior telecoms consultant who worked for a major UK telecommunications company.

For many reasons, which I won’t bother you with, I travel a lot by train and one of the things I have a bad habit of doing is chatting to whoever is unlucky enough to be sitting next to or opposite me. Firstly, if you are someone who I have spoken too, please accept my apologies if all you actually wanted to do was read your novel, catch up with the newspaper or enjoy your latest iTunes download.

I genuinely find snapshots of peoples’ lives from these brief conversations can be quite fascinating. For me, some of the most interesting conversations are around the work that people do and especially their experience of technologies and the associated struggles that they have in their work. When I tell them that I am involved in Document Management and Fax Server technologies, many have stories of how inefficient their businesses are – it’s almost tempting to hand over a business card – but there is a silent etiquette for these conversations that usually precludes it.

Sometimes I am able to suggest ideas to them that they would have dismissed. On a recent journey out of London on a packed commuter train, stood in the vestibule, I chatted to a senior telecoms consultant who worked for a major UK telecommunications company. When he discovered that I worked with fax he was quite dismissive of the technology, not because he felt it was irrelevant – he recognised that there are large business sectors where it is still a key means of communication –  but because fax is unable to integrate into modern IP telephone technologies.

The problem, he explained, was that fax machines and fax servers needed IP voice calls to be converted back into an old style analogue calls – he informed me that when he discussed this with the technology experts in the business and they had confirmed it. I know they are not on their own on this – it seems to be widely accepted by the telecoms industry that fax does not integrate into modern IP infrastructures.

What I was able to explain to him was that his knowledge was out of date! He seemed genuinely surprised to discover that we can connect our Fax Servers via IP (Fax over IP) to either the IP telephone systems (including makes such as Cisco, Avaya and Nortel) or directly to IP trunks provided by the telecommunications company. Many businesses who move to VoIP systems have to put in analogue fax lines or converters to support fax machines and multi-function printers – I explained how we could remove this need.

Then he got off the train.

Left with me in the vestibule area were a mother and daughter, who had spent the last half hour dissecting a burger & fries and a man in uncomfortable looking bicycle shorts, holding his bike up at an odd angle so people could walk by. They didn’t seem that interested in Fax over IP … but maybe a conversation on healthy eating?

If you’d like to talk about how we can help integrate your fax into your VoIP environment, just email with your regular train routes, times and where you sit.

Direct support for fax has been removed from the Unified Messaging server role in Exchange 2010

(source: Microsoft Exchange Server TechCenter)

Mike Rae, Sales Director, Avanquest ProcessFlows

Microsoft has decided to focus on fully software-powered telephony. Office Communicator 2010 and Office Communication Server take PBX out of the communications infrastructure.  This is no doubt the way forward, but for businesses who rely heavily on fax communications (and there are still a lot of them about), this could cause a hiccup.

Microsoft customers who require a fax solution that works with Exchange 2010 will need to deploy an independent fax partner solution.

Avanquest ProcessFlows is an MS Gold Partner and we can help!

For under £5,000, we provide everything you need to facilitate inbound and outbound fax services to unlimited users in a Microsoft Exchange Outlook environment.

• The Microsoft Exchange Fax Server Bundle from Open Text is designed to be tightly integrated with Exchange 2010 and allow UM-enabled users to receive/send fax messages from the desktop.
• Price includes full installation, configuration with basic administration overview, plus 12 months helpdesk support and maintenance.
• We install at the server – linking the Exchange mail server and Active Directory with Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition desktop faxing and database synchronisation features, to create a fully unified fax and email solution.
• There is no need to set-up additional software on each desktop and no requirement for further user training – people can carry on working in their familiar environment.

As it’s nearly Christmas, we thought it would be a good time to mention Bernard Matthews Farms and turkeys!

Bernard Matthews *talked turkey with Avanquest and as a result, have managed to speed up their business processes and eliminate energy guzzling fax machines from their organisation.

* From the Oxford English dictionary: talk turkey “To speak frankly and get down to the basic facts of a matter”

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While people wait for fax technology to fade away, fax machines still sit there, guzzling electricity, attracting dust and spitting out shiny expensive paper.

People still hop up and down from their seats, wearing out the carpet and you still see people sticking rulers under cupboards trying to persuade an escapist document to come out from behind the cables.

As long term fax technology distributors, we know better than most that ‘Email communications’ has been a contender for a decade.  But perhaps it’s because it doesn’t give that same peace of mind, doesn’t give that ‘instant assurance’ that their document was sent and received that email hasn’t displaced the trusty fax machine?

Perhaps it’s because Fax is still the most reliable point-to-point communication there is?

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The recent disruption to our postal service is forcing companies to look at the way they deliver documents in order to minimise the impact to businesses and in some cases, their cash flow.

Secure e-document delivery and output management solutions offer a great alternative to the postal services and help our environment by using tried and tested methods like email and fax to deliver documents quickly and cheaply.

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Fax is still a trusted method of communication in the legal profession, but it can be costly.  Law firm Thomas Eggar has ‘gone electronic’, getting rid of 20 energy consuming fax machines across their 6 office locations.

• As well as saving  the ongoing costs associated with fax hardware – line rental, machine rental and maintenance, electricity, paper and toner – staff time has been saved.
• No more trips to the fax machine.
• Faxes are sent from the desktop, from any location and transmission takes less than a minute per fax.

Neil Renfrew, Head of IT at Thomas Eggar said, “Although fax is regarded as an ‘old’ technology it is still a crucial communication medium within law firms.  The up to date management of inbound and outbound fax traffic benefits all our legal practice groups, as well as our business support teams, which has enabled us to improve working practices.”

Read the full Thomas Eggar case study .

Want to find out your ROI if you switch to electronic fax?  Contact us and ask for a free fax audit.

Any questions?  Ask the Expert

I guess the real question is “How secure is the humble fax machine sitting in the corner of your department?”

Todd Curtis, Public Sector Manager, Avanquest Solutions answers:

Unfortunately, the answer is not secure at all!

The vast majority of Public Sector organisations I visit have one thing in common; they are all wasting approximately £100,000 annually on phone line connections and consumables for fax devices that don’t integrate with line of business systems, waste paper and offer no document security whatsoever.

Think about it … anyone in your organisation can send any document out from a fax machine to whoever they wish without any authority or proof of who actually sent it!

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Q.  There are new FSA Regulations, does fax need to comply?

Tim Muckart, Sales Manager for Financial Services, Avanquest Solutions:

A. Yes…….  But the great news is, it is fairly simple!

From the 9th of March 2009, the FSA rule on retaining Electronic Documents for at least 6 months came into place.  Fax is regarded by the FSA as an electronic document.  The exact type of fax transmission covered seems to vary from Business to Business, so the simplest thing to do is archive everything!

If Fax machines are removed and Multi Function Printers/Devices are fax enabled using a Server Based Fax Management system along with a simple method to retrieve the fax messages, you are covered.

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Q. Fax is an old technology, surely we should be getting rid of fax, not investing in it?

Mike Rae, Sales Director Avanquest Solutions:

A. Even though fax has been around in one form or another for over 150 years, it is still regarded as one of the most reliable, fast and secure methods of communication, so it  is likely to be around for a lot longer.

Despite the proliferation of  email and the web, many organisations still use fax to communicate purchase orders, shipping information, contracts, trading settlements, remittances and many other types of documents.  Even if you don’t send many faxes, you need to be able to receive, action and store them in accordance with service level agreements and regulatory requirements.

Faxes are just as important as other business documents.  In some cases even more so.  The technology surrounding fax has evolved dramatically.

The introduction of networks that support both voice and data means that real-time Fax over IP can be deployed without the need for additional legacy telephony hardware and phone lines.  It is now also easier than ever to integrate fax documents with the applications your company uses to run your business such as email and productivity applications, CRM, ERP, Document Management and Multi-Function devices.