An Introduction to Electronic Faxing
Electronic faxing has come of age. Where before you were constrained to a device on your desk and a traditional phone line, today you are able to harness the power of the internet so as to be able to fax from anywhere you are able to get online. You can fax from wireless devices; you can send broadcast faxes; you can even fax internationally for prices that are close if not the same as faxing domestically.
What are the benefits to faxing online? First off, you won’t need a phone line. You can fax from wherever you have access to your source documents and an internet connection. Conceivably, you could be faxing from the local library workstation, accessing your documents from any popular email service, and sending them to your vendor’s target account. Second off, you eliminate the need to pay for incidentals, namely paper and toner. You receive your faxes in your email, so the only ink you will be using will be to print it out if you need to. Third, your faxes become ultimately portable, as they are delivered your email address in common formats, for example PDF. This is the power of electronic faxing; everything you have become accustomed to on the internet becomes available to you when it comes to your faxing.
For enterprise users, you start dealing with more stringent requirements when it comes to security, privacy, and the variety of regulations that apply when dealing with sensitive documents that are transmitted over the wire. Several electronic vendors provide high levels of security using digital certificates and the like to ensure compliance with the popular regulatory laws, such as HIPAA and SOX.
Taking advantage of the many options for electronic faxing is a straightforward affair. You have many options available to you, and almost all of them offer some sort of free trial for you to give the electronic faxing service a whirl. All of them provide per page costs once you surpass the initial allotment, so it’s important to gauge your electronic faxing needs before picking a package; it is always more cost effective to purchase a package that encompasses your needs as opposed to picking a package that will leave you purchasing a significant amount of overage pages.
Additional features vary from vendor to vendor. Some allow you to pay extra for a vanity number, whereas some vendors are constrained to local numbers only. Most, however, do provide for a toll free number, which allows you to service your clients better than a local number that will require long distance charges. It is important to remember that you do not actually require a land line to start with electronic faxing; the phone number is simply for those people who have not yet made the jump to a similarly advanced technology!
Finally, electronic faxing vendors are almost always offering some sort of special, whether it is a free month based on the number of pages faxed in a month, or reduced prices based on the signing of a long term contract. The point here is that you have to do your homework; find all the different vendors available, and then carefully read about their different offers and packages. Always factor in your needs; some electronic faxing vendors have a great number of features available while others are simply bare bones, and the rule of “you get what you pay for” most definitely holds when it comes to electronic faxing.
Taken together, electronic faxing becomes an attractive component of anyone’s business presence. It leads to greatly reduced costs. It enhances your ability to market yourself or your product. It allows you to better organize your business documents – instead of another stack of paper you can organize your faxes in the same way you do your email.
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