Do You Need a Fax Server?
Fax server software can dramatically improve office productivity and reduce costs. If your organization is still employing stand-alone fax machines, it's wasting time and money and is way behind current fax technology. So, too, if your employees use desktop modems to fax documents, or if you manually fax or mail batch-oriented documents generated from your back-office applications. Fax server software does the job more quickly and efficiently so your employees can be more productive. It also does the job more securely and accurately at a much lower cost.
Fax Server Software: What It Does
Today's fax server software sends and receives documents from the desktop and automates delivery of documents from back-office applications. It gives organizations the flexibility to distribute virtually any document from any application, using a central server integrated in a company's network.
A fax server processes inbound and outbound faxes and stores them on the server. Among other functions, it can track fax history, add fax billing codes, route incoming faxes to groups or individuals' fax or email inboxes, provide fax cover sheets, supply fax notifications, and do broadcast faxing. Today's fax servers integrate with desktop, email, ERP, CRM, host, legacy, and other business applications to automate the delivery of documents such as purchase orders, invoices, and statements. Known as e-document delivery, it provides an electronic method to cost-effectively exchange information with customers and suppliers via fax, email, or over the Internet.
Fax Server Software Benefits
Implementing fax server software for e-document delivery has countless benefits. Some of the top benefits it provides include:
- Fax servers reduce costs. The use of multiple fax servers generally reduces the number of phone lines and ensures least-cost routing of faxes, which makes lower phone bills the norm. In addition, they provide significant savings by eliminating the labor, printing, postage, equipment, and supply costs associated with manual faxing or mailing documents.
- Fax server software improves productivity. By providing email faxing, desktop faxing, and automating delivery of documents from back-office applications, companies that implement fax server software can reduce time-consuming manual processes. Your employees do not have to waste time in line at a fax machine waiting to fax or receive documents. Instead, they can conveniently fax right at their desktop or automatically from business applications.
- Fax servers are secure and reliable. Fax servers integrate faxing and e-document delivery capabilities with your business applications, eliminating the need to worry about lost or missing faxes. Users can send and receive documents directly at their desktops, or large batches of documents such as invoices and purchase orders can automatically be faxed directly and unattended from back-office applications such as Host or ERP systems. In addition, it takes advantage of the latest computer security features and can provide secure delivery alternatives to ensure document confidentiality.
- Fax servers reduce administration and maintenance. Fax server software allows administrators to consolidate faxing services on the network. Administrators do not need to waste time dealing with multiple fax modems, phone lines, or stand-alone fax machines. Centralized and easy-to-use administration tools make ongoing administration simple.
Fax Servers for E-Document Delivery: Do You Need One?
Do you need a fax server? According to Maury Kauffman, managing partner of The Kauffman Group, a consulting firm specializing in fax server technology, if a 25-person organization manually faxes just 30 two-page documents daily, it's squandering 1,000 man hours a year. "That equates to one employee spending six months each year printing documents and feeding fax machines," explains Kauffman. Another industry expert, Peter Davidson of Davidson Consulting, calculates that labor savings from using fax server software in a large company can exceed $100,000 a year. In addition, companies that use fax servers to automate delivery of high-volume, batch-oriented documents such as purchase orders, invoices, and statements can reduce document delivery costs by up to 90 percent.
Those numbers are impressive if you think about the number of documents that go through your business every day. And they don't even take into account the cost of buying fax machines or modems, modem software, toner and paper, or repairs. Nor do they take into account the incalculable cost of even one vitally important fax being lost.
Will your organization benefit from using fax server software for e-document delivery? Most firms with more than 25 employees sending faxes probably need fax server technology; those with more than 50 definitely do.
Choosing Fax Server Software
Choosing the right fax server software can be overwhelming because every manufacturer claims to be the leader, with every product seeming to have "yes" checked in every column of a reviewer's feature comparison chart. If you're about to make a substantial investment in an installation, you probably wonder how to make an informed decision about fax server software before committing yourself.
- Research Fax Server Technology
It's simple: ask the right questions; get the right answers. As computer-based fax server technology has matured, so has fax server software. Fax server software provides more than just network faxing. Now fax servers provide a base platform for e-document delivery via fax, email, or the Internet, as well as secure and certified delivery options. Remember that all products are not created equally. Some features touted as available in a product are executed so differently in a real application that they are hardly comparable without in-depth research. Where do you start your research on fax server technology? Trade shows, Web sites, online computer magazines, and other industry-magazine reviews will help you pinpoint fax server products. - Determine Your Faxing Needs
The next step is to evaluate your company's faxing needs. When selecting a fax server, saving time, leveraging hardware investments, ease of faxing, and integration with applications you are already using should rate high on the list. Do your employees "live" in Outlook, Microsoft Word, IBM/Lotus, or other desktop applications? Do you need to integrate faxing capabilities with ERP, CRM, work- flow, archival, and imaging applications? You'll need an application that supports the software programs your organization uses most. Do you have a multifunction device for copying, scanning, and printing? You can add network-faxing capabilities to this solution to enhance productivity as well. - Determine Your Fax Server Software Budget
Finally, look at cost. What is the budget - both in hard costs to purchase a fax server software system and in hidden costs such as the ability to leverage the hardware and software your company already owns. Ask how transparent the fax server software is for users. If it is difficult to learn and use, people will revert to old-fashioned, stand-alone fax machines, and potential savings will be lost.
Fax Server Software Features to Ask About
When looking for a fax server software solution for your e-document delivery needs, there are some important features to consider.
- Fax and email integration. Fax and email integration is vitally important because people already communicate extensively via email. Your solution needs to integrate fax with the email program your employees already use, for example Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes. They should be able to fax from within the application and receive fax documents as attachments to email messages.
- Fax server integration with back-office applications. Your fax server investment will be best leveraged if you look for a solution that has proven and reliable integrations with all the applications you use to run your business. Does the vendor have strong partnerships and tested integrations with leading ERP, email, CRM, document management, imaging, and multifunction devices? Does your fax server take advantage of technologies that make it easy to integrate with your business systems?
- Single fax server platform for desktop and back office. IT departments are under increasing pressure to justify the value of any IT investment. Therefore, your fax server should give you long-term value and provide a platform for all of your document exchange needs. Can it provide convenient desktop faxing capabilities as well as automate delivery and receipt of back-office documents? Is it robust enough to handle multiple users and integrate with multiple applications? What is the ROI?
- Routing of faxes. The ideal fax server routes a fax over telephone lines, Internet, intranet, WAN, and LAN environments, and directs incoming faxes to the appropriate desktop without human intervention.
- Least-cost routing of faxes. Where do people send their documents? Is your business mostly local? Or does your company have branches or clients all over the country, even the world? According to Davidson Consulting, faxing can account for as much as 40 percent of a company's long distance telephone costs. Ask about least-cost routing (LCR), which automatically transmits faxes by the most economical path, taking advantage of off-hour telephone rates for noncritical faxes and even bypassing commercial telephone lines altogether by using the Internet for international transmissions. Most developers offer LCR, but some have added enhancements that save even more time and money. Check to make certain you can customize LCR. If your company is in New York City but conducts a lot of business in Westchester County and Long Island, you already know that intrastate telephone rates can be higher than interstate. Can you tailor your fax server installation to route your faxes to your firm's fax server in Philadelphia or Boston, or to a third-party service provider to save telephone line charges? With some fax server products you can also customize LCR to optimize server installations at your branch offices. For instance, if your server in Atlanta has a busy fax queue, yet an associate there has prepared a critical outgoing fax, special rules within the fax software can assure the fax goes instantly from your Atlanta office to Chicago for transmission. The sender will not have to do anything to make this happen, and sender and receiver alike will be unaware of the routing change. They will know only that the fax arrived quickly.
- Fax server software with multiple document delivery channels. With today's fax server software, fax should be just one of the methods for document delivery. Does the software allow you to deliver your documents via fax, email, or over the Internet? Does your vendor have a plan in place to take advantage of new and expanding document delivery channels as technology evolves?
- Fax servers with multiple input connectors and data recognition tools. Organizations today require business communications in many formats from a variety of desktop and back-office systems. Look for a solution that provides the flexible data recognition tools needed to capture data from virtually any application. Companies also need to be able to integrate their fax server using technologies that fit their environment. Look for technologies such as Java, XML, or facsimile command language that provide powerful, flexible tools for integrating or customizing the solution specific to an organization's faxing and e-document delivery needs and environment.
- Fax server scalability. Think about your fax server from the perspective of both today and tomorrow. How many people will use it today? How many employees will your organization have five years from now? Organizations grow much faster than you think; nearly every company needs a scalable fax server (one that can grow as your company grows). Will the system you are considering let you build a modular fax server network, i.e., expand, add on, and customize to meet your specific needs? Also, look at licensing. Is the number of users limited, which will necessitate replacing, or spending a lot more money down the line for planned or unforeseen expansion?
- Fax server administration. Is the fax server program easy to install? To maintain? Is back up automatic? Will you have to shut down the fax server to back up or make changes, or will the system be always on? For your own convenience, is remote management possible? What is the fax server software developer's reputation for technical support? Judge this from magazine reviews, industry awards, and success stories on companies' Web pages.
- Remote fax access. How many people do business away from the office? How important is it for them to have access to faxing while on the road? Does the program let users send, receive, and manage faxes from their email mailboxes? Can they access their faxes from the Web? From a touch-tone phone? Be clear about remote-access capabilities of the fax software you are considering.
- Intelligent fax board support. Fax boards vary in price and, as with all products, you get what you pay for. Does the fax server support intelligent fax boards? Intelligent fax boards cost more than modems, but provide hardware intelligence through advanced compression schemes that reduce fax transmission time, thereby lowering operating cost. They also assure a path for smooth upgrades in the future.
- Fax server system security. Naturally, you want to assure that your company's fax documents are safe from prying eyes - both in-house and externally. All fax server products promise security, but you should make certain that passwords cannot be read in plain text, and that password lists are inaccessible to other users. Ask about additional safeguards that ensure that a fax cannot go to the wrong number. Ask if the fax server lets you send documents as encrypted files or certified email to ensure the confidentiality of important communications. Also, check to see if the administrator can control access to billing codes.
- Cost recovery. If the fax server software you are contemplating integrates with PC Docs, FileNet, or another popular document management system, work done by your employees is automatically assigned billing codes - with time spent tracked and updated automatically. If billing codes are important to the way you do business, check that it includes this feature.
- Document faxing. All desktop faxing systems can fax almost anything that resides on the desktop computer. But what if a user needs to fax another document and wants to maintain formatting, graphics, or signatures? Can you fax a variety of file formats? Make certain the faxing software you are considering supports more than message faxing.
- Fax status and notifications. The documents you fax are the lifeblood of your business, so you need to be confident that they reach their destination. Ask what types of fax notifications are available with your solution. Can you receive fax status confirmations in your email or back to a host application?
After considering your organization's faxing needs, you'll come up with more questions, but with these, you're on the way to making an informed decision about the correct fax server software solution for you.
