Virtual Fax Services

One would think that in an age of instant messaging and multimedia-enabled mobile communication the fax machine would be well on its way to be out of the picture. This, however, is not the case. Believe it or not fax still plays a predominant role as a preffered medium for business communications.

There's several reasons for the continued fax-domination of the office communications, not the least of them being management inertia and unwillingness to change old habits. Another one is the fact that the fax machine is actually a huge investment in both time and operating costs. Consider the following factors:

• consider the cost of the actual fax machine;
• the costs of dedicating a separate telephone line for the fax machine;
• the space that needs to be se aside for it in the office;
• the cost of consumables (ink cartridges and perhaps special paper);
• the cost of maintenance (often a yearly contract).

Add to this the time to train your employees to use the new fax machine and the time lost on various issues ranging from paper jams and mis-feeds to the line up by the fax machine and you will understand why big businesses feel emotionally (and financially!) attached to their morally-antiquated fax equipment and feel reluctant to part with it.

For the rest of us, who are flexible and environmentally aware switching to virtual faxing provides a number of advantages.

A virtual fax service will allow you to send and receive faxes without the overhead of buying the fax machine, paper and consumables, dedicating a phone line and some of your office space, dealing with maintenance of the equipment, etc.
By using virtual faxing services you can send and receive faxes directly from your computer (any computer, actually!). No need to repeatedly get up and go over to the fax machine to check if the fax you're waiting for has arrived - instead your faxes are conveniently delivered to your email inbox.
Typically the company will assign a virtual number within your area code to you, to use as your fax number. You may give this number to anyone wishing to send you fax - to them it will look just like a regular direct number with a fax-machine behind it. The faxes sent to this number will be forwarded to an email of your choice, usually in the form of a PDF or TIF attachment. Most often the PDF simply wraps a TIF file which contains the scan of the fax. This provides the convenience of being able to view the fax in any PDF-viewer application such as Adobe's Acrobat family or XPDF but you will not be able to text-search the content of your PDF fax since it's simply a picture or bitmap that only looks like text (no harm done, since a traditional paper-based fax can not be searched for text either:)). Evenm though it is only a picture you still have way more options as compared to a paper fax because you will be able to:

• print the fax and have the paper copy, just as you would with the traditionbal fax-machine
• email the fax to another recepient
• store on your hard disk for future use
• and finally, if you so desire the text-searching capablities - you can use an OCR program to convert the text inside the images to text format and then you will be able to search for text inside of your faxes!

Not only will virtual faxing spare you the walk to the fax machine, it will also provide a solution to a multitude of privacy and security issues arising from the use of one common fax machine by everyone in the same office.