Enterprise Faxing

Introduction

Effective communication is one of the most important elements of a successful business, and communication modes have broadened in recent years to include not just voice, but fax and electronic data too.

The use of the LAN and WAN, and the more widespread acceptance of newer technologies such as electronic mail and computer-based faxing, has helped to increase the efficiency of communications in many companies throughout the world.

However, if your company is typical of the majority in the UK at the moment, the paperless office is far from a reality. In fact, the reverse is the case in many companies thanks to that bane of the rain forest - the fax machine.

With over fifty-five million fax machines currently in service world-wide, and annual sales rising from 12 million units in 1995 to an expected 20 million units in 1999, it is less of a surprise than you would expect to find that fax is, in fact, the number one method of sending messages between UK companies. In 1995, a massive 8000 million faxes were sent between UK companies, compared with 5000 million posted items (source: Royal Mail) and under 200 million e-mails. Furthermore, a 1995 Gallup study commissioned by Pitney Bowes amongst US Fortune 500 companies revealed that 44 per cent of companies were expecting their fax usage to increase - while 50 per cent reported that they were investing in new equipment.

Unfortunately therefore, paper will continue to spew seemingly endlessly from the office fax machine, and whilst some of it is undoubtedly urgent, the fax has sadly become the latest tool in the armoury of the "junk mailer", resulting in unwanted material which actually costs you money and simply ends up in the bin.

Fax Strategy

But whilst incoming faxes from external sources only cost you the paper required to print them out, much more serious costs are being run up for outgoing calls. One company who is well aware of this is Pitney Bowes, one of the leading lights in the facsimile world. It offers a unique service in the shape of the "fax audit", where Pitney Bowes consultants will examine fax usage within an organisation, establish fax traffic patterns, identify bottlenecks and potential weak points, and recommend a cohesive strategy.

In the experience of Pitney Bowes consultants, there is an almost total lack of strategy in most organisations audited. Those consultants will encourage companies to realise that a fax is a connected system and to stop treating it like a photocopier, firmly believing that developing a company-wide purchasing strategy will help to keep costs down.

A major part of the thinking behind this is the increased performance, and thus lower transmission costs, when faxes from the same manufacturer talk to one another. This means that not only are initial negotiation times reduced but, more importantly on long documents, the inter-page handshake times are also reduced by a factor of ten. Naturally, these savings are only noticed when two similar faxes are communicating, so transmissions outside the company are governed by the type of fax used by the receiving party - if it is a 9600 fax, then 9600 is all you get! However, according to Pitney Bowes, a significant proportion of all fax traffic is wholly within a company. When an organisation has several branches spread around the world, you can begin to appreciate the type of savings which can be made by standardising on a single fax machine throughout.

Lack of training is another problem, since further savings can be made by making use of more advanced features such as the ability to read documents into memory and transmit them at a off-peak times, batching a number of documents destined for the same location and automatically sending them all as a single fax, or using spare bandwidth on existing leased lines for intra company fax transmissions.

Despite the advantages on offer from purely computer-based communications - made available through the proliferation of Local and Wide Area Networks (LAN/WAN) - fax remains popular. The natural requirement, therefore, is for a link between the enterprise fax and computer systems.

Although Pitney Bowes offers the option to connect some of their models to a computer system, most sites considering any form of computer-based fax begin with the humble fax modem. Of course, being able to send a fax without moving from your desk is a luxury and a definite temptation which can lead to carelessness - would you really send that fifty-page document if you had to print it out and feed it page by page into the fax machine?

The problem is compounded if, once again, there is no coherent corporate-wide fax policy in place, and can be particularly expensive in the case of computer-based faxing (CBF). The reason is that the modem is now considered a common tool amongst end users, and low-cost fax modems are now being purchased in vast numbers. The convenience of faxing from the desk is more than offset by the high cost of long distance and international calls at speeds of 2400bps, which is often the maximum speed that the cheaper fax modems are capable of, especially when there is significant line noise present.

With many companies decentralising their computing resources, it is often left up to the department heads or even the individual users to purchase commodity items - and that is exactly what the fax modem has been reduced to, especially when the price is so low that it can be purchased from petty cash with no capital expenditure authorisation required. As with stand alone machines, someone needs to grasp the nettle and take responsibility for the problem - and in this case it is likely to be the IT department. This is because we are now looking at purchasing a much higher specification fax modem in the shape of the network fax card (from the likes of Gammalink and Brooktrout) and installing it in a central fax server located on the LAN. This makes use of the currently fashionable - and highly cost effective - notion of a client/server architecture, whereby anyone with access to the network can now send a fax, but the jobs are submitted to, queued at, and processed by the PC acting as the fax server.

"With the client/server approach, we gain the benefit of a high performance, high quality central fax machine, yet we retain the convenience of being able to fax from our desk", explains Tony Duerinck of Gammalink. "Products like the Gammafax card offer a higher degree of manageability, reliability and performance, with higher raw throughput speeds and advanced data compression and error correction features offering the potential for huge cost savings. The computer-based fax solution also provides the capability to integrate closely with existing applications where, perhaps, an overnight report from the head office database could automatically be faxed to all the branch offices before business opens the next day".

The same philosophy is adopted by other manufacturers such as Castelle and DCE, both of whom provide turnkey fax server products which include all the necessary hardware and software. But these companies are all too aware of the difficulty of selling a high-end product into a market which is perceived as having a distinct lack of glamour. The problem is that very few people think of computer-based fax as being mission critical - it’s just not glamorous enough. Technically, in fact, it is a very stupid way of moving information around, but it is so ordinary and so common that it simply cannot be ignored.

Even in the face of the proliferation of e-mail - and now voice mail - systems, the fact remains that people are familiar and comfortable with the fax. Unfortunately for the computer-based fax vendors, they still have a way to go before their technology is accepted as the norm - certainly in the UK. After all, everyone is happy with a piece of paper (many still prefer paper-based memos to using e-mail) and the telephone, and what could be simpler than sticking a piece of A4 in a fax machine and pressing a few buttons?

However, for those companies willing to look beyond the basics, there are a number of technologies available in a computer-based fax environment which are quite simply not possible by any other means :

Fax On Demand

Although computer-based faxing is becoming commonplace in business these days, fax on demand (FOD) remains a niche application. With such a system, extensive product literature and reference material can be placed on your network (or stand alone FOD server), each document identified by a unique number, and listed in a fax "catalogue". The FOD system will identify the document ID of the catalogue, or index, and this will be the first document requested by new users. Another common approach is to identify specific fax ID’s in press releases, product literature or pages on a Web site.

Potential or existing customers can then dial in and request any of this information from the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. Document ID’s can be entered by keying them in on the telephone keypad or by speaking the digits if voice recognition software is employed. After providing their own fax number to the system in the same manner, the requested literature arrives on their local fax machine within minutes.

The applications are numerous - from sales to marketing to technical support. As with a Web site, FOD provides the ability to disseminate large quantities of information directly to end users without having to tie up internal calls or customer care staff on telephone calls.

Fax Broadcast

Most of you who have access to a fax machine in any shape or form will have been the lucky recipient of the fax "mail shot" at some time or other - much more annoying than postal junk mail because fax junk mail actually costs YOU money.

However, if you are in the business of sending out mass mailings, then fax broadcast is an increasingly popular means of delivery. Recipient lists can be built from the central fax database or can often be imported from existing databases of names and fax numbers. The image list - the material which comprises the mail shot - can be created and "packaged" on the fly for a one-off mailing, or a number of documents can be selected from a document database, not unlike that used for a FOD system. In fact, FOD and fax broadcast often go hand in hand, with the same system capable of handling both (like the Ibex FactsLine package). The completed broadcast can usually have a number of options stored against it, such as time and date to begin, whether to include a cover page, whether to superimpose customised information on the first page of the first document, and so on.

Another useful option to have is "test broadcast" facility, which allows you to ensure that the result is as you expect before you send it off to 100,000 recipients, and comprehensive logging and management reporting functions are vital.

Unified Messaging

For some time now the CTI industry has been seeking its own Holy Grail - that of unified messaging. Unified messaging systems allow users to manage e-mail, workflow and scheduling, voice mail, video and fax documents in a single in-box, rather than being forced to repeatedly switch between different client software to process e-mail, fax, voice mail, etc. Most unified messaging applications include both a graphical user interface for desktop use and a telephone interface for remote users.

There have been a few half-hearted or abortive attempts to provide true unified messaging in recent years, all of which have suffered from one major problem - they have been proprietary.

However, with the introduction of advanced groupware systems such as Novell GroupWise and Microsoft Exchange Server it appears that the goal may finally be attained. Thanks to the open architecture of these platforms, it is possible for third parties to provide "plug in" modules to create additional functionality in a seamless manner. For instance, Octel has developed voice players and voice mail extensions for Exchange, allowing voice mail messages to be represented in the standard Exchange in-box.

In the same way, extensions have been produced which allow incoming faxes to be routed directly to individual e-mail in-boxes. These can be viewed and printed locally at leisure, with all fax and standard e-mail messages being handled from a single client. Automatic or on-demand redirection capabilities mean that remote or mobile users can have their stored faxes forwarded to wherever they happen to be at that moment. Where there is a high level of integration between fax and e-mail systems, it is even possible for standard e-mail messages to be picked up from the system at the office and faxed to users at another location if that is more convenient.

Voice Integration

In full-blown CTI implementations a voice/telephony card is often coupled with a fax card in the telephony server, providing additional exciting possibilities. For instance, if the only means of e-mail retrieval is the telephone - no convenient fax or remote-connected laptop - text to speech facilities available on even the basic voice processing cards allow e-mail messages to be spoken to the recipient over the phone line.

The next step (possibly not too far away) is fax to speech, allowing the text portion of stored faxes to be spoken to the caller. Although this may sound very similar to the text to speech facility just mentioned, it should be remembered that text in e-mail messages is already in a computer-readable form. Text on a fax must first go through some form of reliable Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process to convert it to the same format as the e-mail message, and it is the production of such high-quality OCR software at a reasonable price which is currently the only barrier to this facility becoming widely available.

Internet Fax

Although the marriage may not, at first glance, seem appropriate, Internet fax technology is already proving popular in certain environments.

The first technical solutions which provided the ability to send faxes over the Internet were e-mail to fax gateways, which allowed e-mail users to address e-mail recipients and fax recipients in one message.

More recently, however, Internet fax gateways have emerged which route traffic both on and off the Internet, handling the conversion from fax images to Internet protocols, and calculating least cost routing where required. When a fax is sent, it is passed to an Internet fax gateway server which uses the Internet to contact another Internet fax gateway near the destination fax machine - perhaps in another country. The fax is then transmitted across the Internet to the remote gateway which then initiates a local phone call to effect delivery. Obviously the potential for cost savings using such technology is huge, since only local calls are involved rather than costly international calls.

At the moment, however, the Internet fax gateway products used by ISP’s such as NetXchange and Netcentric are proprietary - in other words, ISP’s at each end of a transmission must use the same underlying protocol. The emergence of Internet fax standards will be an important step forward for Internet Fax Gateway suppliers and end users alike.

There have been several noteworthy moves towards the development of such standards. Firstly, there is the work of the Internet Engineering Task Force which has been concerned with moving fax images across the Internet from one e-mail account to another.

More significantly, however, was the announcement of the Group 5 Messaging Forum at Faxworld in San Francisco recently. The Forum will promote the Group 5 Messaging Standard, an interoperability agreement to deliver multi-media messages which is supported by 30 of the largest vendors in the computer-based fax industry. The work of the body will focus initially on Internet faxing, and will aim its messages at CBF equipment and software suppliers, fax machine manufacturers and Internet mail companies.

Another fax application involves using the Web as a huge fax-on-demand server. Ibex is doing just that, and by using the Netscape API and available CT building blocks, the telephone is transformed into a powerful document-on-demand terminal. Two approaches can be used here. The first is the ability for users to select Web pages and have the contents faxed to them. The second is for information providers offer a fax-on-demand menu on their own Web page. After the user has selected a document and entered the fax number, the details are passed from the Web to the fax server, which then transmits the fax as requested.

Summary

Despite the proliferation of more efficient means of electronic communication, the ubiquitous nature of the fax machine - particularly given the current strength of sales - seems set to ensure the continued popularity of the medium.

The advent of computer-based faxing and its partnership with the Internet moves things forward again, and will prove of particular importance in enterprise faxing applications. CBF and the Internet will ensure the survival of that particular means of document transmission for some time to come.

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