Fax Up Your UC Solution

In this month's column we examine one of the most recognized ways to get started with unified communications, unified messaging. Once someone has experienced UM, they can't imagine life without it and often find it aggravating to work in a business that doesn't provide UM capabilities.

Patented in 1843 by Alexander Bain 33 years before the telephone, fax machines became cost effective in the 1970's, ubiquitous within businesses in the 1980's and have remained so ever since. Soothsayers may tell you that fax is dead or at least dying. They are of course wrong, just like the predicted demise of POTS when ISDN came along.

Indeed, although fax machines themselves are growing at a lower rate today as fax becomes increasingly paperless, there are still about 120 million fax machines in use today worldwide. Ask yourself if any operating business is likely to remove its ability to send and receive faxes any time soon. The answer is, of course, a resounding "no!"

Every business needs a fax number, but why? The answer is simply that the humble fax is the lowest common denominator for document exchange worldwide bar none, something that will always work for everyone without having to think about it. And it's for this reason that even two of the most evangelistic proponents of softcopy document interchange formats, Microsoft with XPF and Adobe with PDF, still list fax numbers for their offices.

Fax is taken for granted as part of daily business operations, especially in verticals like finance, government, real estate, medical, construction, manufacturing and legal. A wide variety of smaller businesses across all sectors also rely heavily on fax, especially when they are exchanging documents with consumers or a wide variety of changing suppliers and partners. For these types of businesses, fax is the primary method of document exchange, so fax is a critical part of their daily business processes.

Using a fax server to replace fax machines has such a good ROI - even if you have a minimal IT infrastructure - that it's difficult to understand why only a small percentage of SMEs are using them. Mostly it's just because SMEs aren't aware that they can improve their business processes associated with fax and their bottom lines at the same time, by using fax server technology that is now easily accessible and very affordable. The good news for these businesses is that many unified communications products now include a fax server or at least have partners that can add one as part of their solution.

You will find that adding fax to your first UC initiative can come at a surprisingly low cost, has an easily identifiable and understandable hard ROI, and a host of secondary soft benefits. So, if fax is a critical part of your daily business processes and you are currently using fax machines and paper faxes, you will see significant benefits from adding fax as part of a UC deployment.

The hard ROI benefits of adding fax as part of a UC solution include:

• fewer telephone lines since you can share lines between voice and fax;
• lower costs for DID numbers since you can share a single number for voice and fax;
the ability to eliminate fax machines and their associated power, maintenance and cost of supplies; and
• the option to centralize fax services in geographically dispersed organizations.

 

The soft benefits of going to paperless fax include reduced time to send and receive faxes, increased security (no more paper faxes lying around), archiving and retrieving faxes as electronic documents, anytime anywhere access for employees receiving faxes in their email (unified messaging) or via integrated messaging on any PC or smart phone, the ability to send any printable document as a fax, not to mention corporate compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA.

 

And because you are eliminating power, paper, supplies and fax machines, you are also reducing your carbon footprint. As an added benefit, most fax servers will also allow you to send faxes broadcast-style to distribution lists. Some UC fax solutions also allow you to develop custom application services with features such as fax back in IVR services, enabling you to add fax capabilities to customer self service.

 

On a final note, many SIP trunking providers now support T.38 fax over IP - or FoIP - as part of their service offerings. This allows UC fax solutions to take advantage of shared voice/fax SIP trunking facilities to reduce the long-distance charges associated with fax transmissions.

 

Similar to the benefits I outlined in my last column on unified messaging, fax as part of a UC solution makes work life easier for employees. And less stressed, happier employees are priceless.

 

David Levy is president and CEO of Objectworld Communications (www.objectworld.com).