Fax Services Fax communication is a critical business function of most firms. Today, you can receive, view, annotate and send faxes without ever having to print or manually feed a document. The cost savings for a law firm can be immense. If you can fax a document electronically in one minute instead of manually faxing a document in 10 minutes, it is a tremendous saving in personnel time. Since Alexander Bain patented the facsimile device in 1843 there are today over 110 million fax machines worldwide according to IDC. IDC predicts that there will be 200 million fax machines by 2020. However, IDC says these will not be 90,000,000 new standalone units. There will be more fax to e-mail services and multifunction devices that print, scan and convert paper documents to digital files. Fax stands for facsimile transmission. A fax machine scans a piece of paper, digitizes it to an image and then sends it as electronic signals over transmission lines to a fax machine. The receiving machine recreates the image. Your firm should consider a fax server. Fax servers send and receive faxes form a server integrated into the firm’s network. Features to consider:
Products: Rightfax (www.rightfax.com); and Optus (www.facsys.com). |