So here is a quick quiz about a little known fact regarding facsimile (aka Fax). Take a guess as to when fax was invented. By the way, don’t cheat by looking it up on the Internet.
If you said Scottish inventor Alexander Bain got a patent for what is considered the earliest version of a fax machine, on May 27, 1843 for his “Electric Printing Telegraph,” you are a real trivia expert since that is the correct answer. Plus, remember that this is roughly 33 years before Alexander Graham Bell beat Elisha Gray to the U.S. Patent office for his invention we call the telephone.
Fast forward.
Without going through the timeline of fax technology developments over the years, the ability to send and receive images anywhere in the world and have it treated as a lawful replication for transactional purposes has gone through many metamorphoses over the years. Interestingly, after the explosive growth of fax machines for use in business transactions following adoption of the Group III standard in the early 1980s, there has been a constant wave of predictions that thanks to email and the Internet fax would disappear. The realities are that the predictions of fax’s death were extremely premature.
The facts about fax are that it is still used millions of times per day worldwide. Not only does it continue to leverage the ubiquitous communications capability gained from being connectable via telephone numbers, but in case you have not been paying attention, you don’t need a fax machine anymore to send and receive facsimiles and the Internet is now very fax-friendly. Indeed, fax functionality, because of its integration with unified communications (UC) capabilities and especially email, is as vibrant as ever.
In fact, there are a lot of things you may not know about fax, and how it can and should be a key part of the mix in your ability to do rapid, convenient and legally-certifiable transactions for things that drive top-line revenues in the form of purchase orders, claim forms, supplier quotes, signed contracts and in countless other ways.
In short, fax is something to leverage and not obsolete, and understanding how and why can be extremely valuable to your organization. It is for this reason that fax solutions provider OpenText is sponsoring a four-part webinar series, Fax: Moving from Tradition to Contemporary.
I will be moderating the series, whose first event, Faxing For The 21st Century – No Fax Machines Required, will be October 28, 2014 at 2:00 PM EDT. Join Amy Campos, Product Marketing Manager, OpenText and I as we explore how you can put fax capability at every workstation in your organization.
Topics to be covered include:
- Easily fax from the application you use most – email
- Accelerate the exchange of information that is critical to your business
- Eliminate fax machines while automating and integrating the exchange of fax documents
We also have made it convenient for you to register for the entire series whose topics you will see on the registration page.
Find out all of the things you may not know about the value of fax. It may have a long history, but in terms of its business value it also has a bright future as well when you know how best to employ it.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi