Comments on: Why Do Companies Fax?

By: Scott Hagenus

Scott Hagenus — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 16:48:32 +0000

@ zuhair, thanks for the question.

You can assign many users to one number or one line for routing. This means that one fax coming in on one line would go to multiple people.

Another way of routing if you only had one line or one number you could use, would be to use the OCR routing. In this way, any fax coming in on the single line will be converted to text and will be searched for words you specifiy. Individual users would be assigned to those search words and the fax would be sent to that user if the search found a match. OCR routing is not 100% accurate, and therefore a safe guard is in place that when a fax des not meet any OCR matches, GFI FaxMaker will then route the fax to a “Default” routing recipient.

Hope this helps.

By: zuhair

zuhair — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 09:58:51 +0000

hi
i want to know that by gfi faxmaker multiple user can recived fax by only one number or one line if yes then how

By: Scott Hagenus

Scott Hagenus — Fri, 18 May 2012 21:19:25 +0000

@Jon: Very good question Jon, and glad you brought it up. The answer to this is relatively easy. Faxing uses telecommunications paths and fax protocols. Chances of intercepting and interpreting the fax communication in a meaningful way is somewhat slim in comparison to email. When a fax comes into a company that uses a fax server, the fax server answers the call, locally converts to an electronic document, attaches to an email and hands it off to the companies mail server. Typically this is all done within the “4 walls” of that company, hence the email itself is never leaving the organization’s network. On top of that it is going directly to the person it is intended for if using fax routing. The reverse is somewhat true for sending a fax from email using a fax server. The transfer of information is generally done within the “4 walls” of the company (client to email server, email server to network fax server), hits the fax server and the fax server then converts it to a fax and sends the fax out via the company’s telecommunication path.

Remember too, that the fax itself does not have to be sent or received via email, there are other methods a fax server can accept a document to send as a fax. Examples are via printer drivers or APIs. On receiving, fax servers can drop the faxes to designated folders for retrieval, so you don’t necessarily have to have the fax in the email itself.

That is the beauty of a fax server, the flexibility it allows you.

By: jon

jon — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:05:46 +0000

How can faxing be more secure than email, when you are talking about converting fax to email using gfi faxmaker? a faxconverted to email is same as email right?

By: Scott Hagenus

Scott Hagenus — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 12:27:35 +0000

Mike, I totally understand the question. The explanation can be extremely long with many facets.

I’ll tackle some of it in this reply:
It is more about who businesses do business with. If my customers and my industry demand signatures, and my customers prefer using ink to do this, chances are they are going to want to post or fax me the information I require of them, or they are going to want to receive paper based information in the same method.

Age, location, demographic, industry, type of information, regulations all play a factor.

If my customer base wants to communicate with me by fax, then I need the most efficient method to do so, receiving and sending them electronically at my end gives me the best of every world. I can do all from my applications and desktop, and still deliver and receive my customers communication via fax. No need to print or scan. Anecdotally, I recall company developing an excellent ecommerce site to significantly reduce the order entry and processing burden they had. When the project went live, it did not have the impact on that burden they had anticipated. What they had failed to do was understand that their customer base came from an extremely old industry that was just used to sending orders in via paper – postal or fax. Needless to say, they then invested in a fax server which had an immediate and significant impact to efficiency gains and ROI.

And then there is security, as odd as it sounds, faxing is an extremely secure way of transmitting information. In healthcare, HIPAA dictates that communicating patient information be done in a secure manner. While email systems require changes to encrypt the communication, and that communicating parties understand and abide by this for it to be effective, faxing requires no change at all. I’ll be honest and say I don’t know the number of instances where a phone line has been tapped, fax traffic intercepted, handshakes occurring correctly and confidential information then garnered from that. I think it would be safe to say nowhere near as many times as email leaks. Another reason why faxing persists. There are many other industries that benefit from that same secure communication, Insurance for instance.

Apologies for the length of the reply and hope this helps explain a little more.

By: Mike Canberg

Mike Canberg — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:51:37 +0000

One thing I’ve never understood, any perhaps you can illuminate the subject for me, is why faxing persists when the same thing can be accomplished using a printer/scanner? Granted that, especially if the two devices are separate, it can be almost more inconvenient than operating with a fax, but it just seems like one of those technological advances that should have already happened.