Need some help with a better fax solution
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We use RingCentral for VoIP, so faxing is included. They have 3 options for sending faxes. Emails to [email protected], through deskphone app, or printing to virtual printers installed on desktops.
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@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
We use RingCentral for VoIP, so faxing is included. They have 3 options for sending faxes. Emails to [email protected], through deskphone app, or printing to virtual printers installed on desktops.
We're going with a new Cisco voip and I guess they don't have a fax solution... rips hair out
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@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
We use RingCentral for VoIP, so faxing is included. They have 3 options for sending faxes. Emails to [email protected], through deskphone app, or printing to virtual printers installed on desktops.
We're going with a new Cisco voip and I guess they don't have a fax solution... rips hair out
Ewww
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@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
We use RingCentral for VoIP, so faxing is included. They have 3 options for sending faxes. Emails to [email protected], through deskphone app, or printing to virtual printers installed on desktops.
We're going with a new Cisco voip and I guess they don't have a fax solution... rips hair out
Perhaps it's time to fire the first person for buying Cisco.
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@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
We use RingCentral for VoIP, so faxing is included. They have 3 options for sending faxes. Emails to [email protected], through deskphone app, or printing to virtual printers installed on desktops.
We're going with a new Cisco voip and I guess they don't have a fax solution... rips hair out
Perhaps it's time to fire the first person for buying Cisco.
That would be the first step. Find the root cause of the problems.
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https://www.ringcentral.com/lp/smallbusinessphoneoffer.html - show this to your bean counters
I have this phone sitting on my desk for probably 3 years now, rock solid.
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@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
This is the solution we chose for faxing was using voip.ms's virtual fax service. I ported the number we were using for faxing to them. I setup E-mail to fax so inbound faxes are sent to [email protected]. You could set that to be the address of your fax E-mail group. For outbound faxing, users (who I've authorized to fax) send a message to [email protected] with an attachment. Our printer doesn't have a direct scan-to-E-mail option, so if my users don't already have a digital document of what they want to fax, they'll need to scan it. The system is pretty bare bones, but it meets our needs.
I was hoping fax would just go away for us when we moved to FreePBX + Twilio SIP trunking, but On High requires it, and I decided that wasn't a battle worth fighting.
What about if you want faxes to go to different departments? Would you have a separate fax line for each department or is there an easier way that I'm not thinking of?
Also, turns out our Bizhub C454e has a PC Fax driver so users can just send faxes from their PC. I'm hurrying to install this now.
For that, if I used voip.ms, I'd probably have to have a separate DID for each department. I'm in a situation where that's not a requirement, and we just have one place for faxes. That being said, the aforementioned mailbox is a mail-enabled public folder, to which I've only granted access to the people in the office who would have been the people would could access faxes anyway.
Yeah that's pretty much how we have it set up now. I have a couple extra phone lines I could be using for fax to different departments...
You might want to check eGoldFax and see if they can do what you want. Folks here have spoke highly of them. Their cheapest eGoldFax plan was around $30 / month, and for our volume (or lack thereof) of faxing, the pricing didn't make sense.
oh wow, eGoldFax looks perfect. Completely cloud hosted with no hardware or software to install... thanks!
That's the way that I think most companies are going today. Not that service specifically, just fully hosted fax services. It's worth just making that whole component go away.
We just had a meeting with our printer support vendor and they want to sell us this solution involving a virtual fax server and stuff that's ballpark $8,000. I'm just silently ripping my hair out while my CIO eats it up.
So... asking a sales person what you need instead of telling them what you need, of course, it's their job! http://www.smbitjournal.com/author/admin/page/9/
I'm no longer so surprised when people in management fall into this trap. It's the Wizard's First Rule after all (yes, I'm reading Terry Goodkind's fantasy series currently, expect more references to the Wizzards First Rule.)
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@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
https://www.ringcentral.com/lp/smallbusinessphoneoffer.html - show this to your bean counters
I have this phone sitting on my desk for probably 3 years now, rock solid.
And those are crazy expensive compared to a lot of offerings, unless you have just a couple people. We see the crossover around ten users. Past that, RingCentral is too expensive.
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@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
This is the solution we chose for faxing was using voip.ms's virtual fax service. I ported the number we were using for faxing to them. I setup E-mail to fax so inbound faxes are sent to [email protected]. You could set that to be the address of your fax E-mail group. For outbound faxing, users (who I've authorized to fax) send a message to [email protected] with an attachment. Our printer doesn't have a direct scan-to-E-mail option, so if my users don't already have a digital document of what they want to fax, they'll need to scan it. The system is pretty bare bones, but it meets our needs.
I was hoping fax would just go away for us when we moved to FreePBX + Twilio SIP trunking, but On High requires it, and I decided that wasn't a battle worth fighting.
What about if you want faxes to go to different departments? Would you have a separate fax line for each department or is there an easier way that I'm not thinking of?
Also, turns out our Bizhub C454e has a PC Fax driver so users can just send faxes from their PC. I'm hurrying to install this now.
For that, if I used voip.ms, I'd probably have to have a separate DID for each department. I'm in a situation where that's not a requirement, and we just have one place for faxes. That being said, the aforementioned mailbox is a mail-enabled public folder, to which I've only granted access to the people in the office who would have been the people would could access faxes anyway.
Yeah that's pretty much how we have it set up now. I have a couple extra phone lines I could be using for fax to different departments...
You might want to check eGoldFax and see if they can do what you want. Folks here have spoke highly of them. Their cheapest eGoldFax plan was around $30 / month, and for our volume (or lack thereof) of faxing, the pricing didn't make sense.
oh wow, eGoldFax looks perfect. Completely cloud hosted with no hardware or software to install... thanks!
That's the way that I think most companies are going today. Not that service specifically, just fully hosted fax services. It's worth just making that whole component go away.
We just had a meeting with our printer support vendor and they want to sell us this solution involving a virtual fax server and stuff that's ballpark $8,000. I'm just silently ripping my hair out while my CIO eats it up.
So your CIO isn't even an intern level? That's basic adulting, how do people like this even get employed?
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You should print out my ream of articles on how to deal with sales people, and show him the videos.
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@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
https://www.ringcentral.com/lp/smallbusinessphoneoffer.html - show this to your bean counters
I have this phone sitting on my desk for probably 3 years now, rock solid.
And those are crazy expensive compared to a lot of offerings, unless you have just a couple people. We see the crossover around ten users. Past that, RingCentral is too expensive.
It's never expensive when it's free. And they give you 20 for free. The phone service price is on a higher end, but you could do a lot worse.
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@travisdh1 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
This is the solution we chose for faxing was using voip.ms's virtual fax service. I ported the number we were using for faxing to them. I setup E-mail to fax so inbound faxes are sent to [email protected]. You could set that to be the address of your fax E-mail group. For outbound faxing, users (who I've authorized to fax) send a message to [email protected] with an attachment. Our printer doesn't have a direct scan-to-E-mail option, so if my users don't already have a digital document of what they want to fax, they'll need to scan it. The system is pretty bare bones, but it meets our needs.
I was hoping fax would just go away for us when we moved to FreePBX + Twilio SIP trunking, but On High requires it, and I decided that wasn't a battle worth fighting.
What about if you want faxes to go to different departments? Would you have a separate fax line for each department or is there an easier way that I'm not thinking of?
Also, turns out our Bizhub C454e has a PC Fax driver so users can just send faxes from their PC. I'm hurrying to install this now.
For that, if I used voip.ms, I'd probably have to have a separate DID for each department. I'm in a situation where that's not a requirement, and we just have one place for faxes. That being said, the aforementioned mailbox is a mail-enabled public folder, to which I've only granted access to the people in the office who would have been the people would could access faxes anyway.
Yeah that's pretty much how we have it set up now. I have a couple extra phone lines I could be using for fax to different departments...
You might want to check eGoldFax and see if they can do what you want. Folks here have spoke highly of them. Their cheapest eGoldFax plan was around $30 / month, and for our volume (or lack thereof) of faxing, the pricing didn't make sense.
oh wow, eGoldFax looks perfect. Completely cloud hosted with no hardware or software to install... thanks!
That's the way that I think most companies are going today. Not that service specifically, just fully hosted fax services. It's worth just making that whole component go away.
We just had a meeting with our printer support vendor and they want to sell us this solution involving a virtual fax server and stuff that's ballpark $8,000. I'm just silently ripping my hair out while my CIO eats it up.
So... asking a sales person what you need instead of telling them what you need, of course, it's their job! http://www.smbitjournal.com/author/admin/page/9/
I'm no longer so surprised when people in management fall into this trap. It's the Wizard's First Rule after all (yes, I'm reading Terry Goodkind's fantasy series currently, expect more references to the Wizzards First Rule.)
Ah yes, I know of Wizard's First Rule!!! I read that when I was back in high school. Good series!
And yes, I know about not asking sales people for advice now that I've gotten flamed by Scott Allen Miller (LOL). We just had the meeting to see what they offer but I know what I want, and they don't offer it.
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@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
This is the solution we chose for faxing was using voip.ms's virtual fax service. I ported the number we were using for faxing to them. I setup E-mail to fax so inbound faxes are sent to [email protected]. You could set that to be the address of your fax E-mail group. For outbound faxing, users (who I've authorized to fax) send a message to [email protected] with an attachment. Our printer doesn't have a direct scan-to-E-mail option, so if my users don't already have a digital document of what they want to fax, they'll need to scan it. The system is pretty bare bones, but it meets our needs.
I was hoping fax would just go away for us when we moved to FreePBX + Twilio SIP trunking, but On High requires it, and I decided that wasn't a battle worth fighting.
What about if you want faxes to go to different departments? Would you have a separate fax line for each department or is there an easier way that I'm not thinking of?
Also, turns out our Bizhub C454e has a PC Fax driver so users can just send faxes from their PC. I'm hurrying to install this now.
For that, if I used voip.ms, I'd probably have to have a separate DID for each department. I'm in a situation where that's not a requirement, and we just have one place for faxes. That being said, the aforementioned mailbox is a mail-enabled public folder, to which I've only granted access to the people in the office who would have been the people would could access faxes anyway.
Yeah that's pretty much how we have it set up now. I have a couple extra phone lines I could be using for fax to different departments...
You might want to check eGoldFax and see if they can do what you want. Folks here have spoke highly of them. Their cheapest eGoldFax plan was around $30 / month, and for our volume (or lack thereof) of faxing, the pricing didn't make sense.
oh wow, eGoldFax looks perfect. Completely cloud hosted with no hardware or software to install... thanks!
That's the way that I think most companies are going today. Not that service specifically, just fully hosted fax services. It's worth just making that whole component go away.
We just had a meeting with our printer support vendor and they want to sell us this solution involving a virtual fax server and stuff that's ballpark $8,000. I'm just silently ripping my hair out while my CIO eats it up.
So your CIO isn't even an intern level? That's basic adulting, how do people like this even get employed?
He's a friend of the owners of my company. He makes over $150k per year but he doesn't know much about IT at all. He more or less deals with businessy stuff and policies and "vendor management"... he works about 25 hours a week and is kind of a spendthrift. I can't do anything about it except try to "manage upward"..
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@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
We use RingCentral for VoIP, so faxing is included. They have 3 options for sending faxes. Emails to [email protected], through deskphone app, or printing to virtual printers installed on desktops.
We're going with a new Cisco voip and I guess they don't have a fax solution... rips hair out
Perhaps it's time to fire the first person for buying Cisco.
That would be the first step. Find the root cause of the problems.
That's my CIO who thinks Cisco is the way to go since it's Cisco. I tried telling him about Vonage and other far cheaper voip solutions but he doesn't really hear what I'm saying.
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@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
We use RingCentral for VoIP, so faxing is included. They have 3 options for sending faxes. Emails to [email protected], through deskphone app, or printing to virtual printers installed on desktops.
We're going with a new Cisco voip and I guess they don't have a fax solution... rips hair out
Perhaps it's time to fire the first person for buying Cisco.
That would be the first step. Find the root cause of the problems.
That's my CIO who thinks Cisco is the way to go since it's Cisco. I tried telling him about Vonage and other far cheaper voip solutions but he doesn't really hear what I'm saying.
The root of the issue is whoever hired a CIO that isn't qualified to work in IT (or business.) That's not the logic of a business person.
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@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
This is the solution we chose for faxing was using voip.ms's virtual fax service. I ported the number we were using for faxing to them. I setup E-mail to fax so inbound faxes are sent to [email protected]. You could set that to be the address of your fax E-mail group. For outbound faxing, users (who I've authorized to fax) send a message to [email protected] with an attachment. Our printer doesn't have a direct scan-to-E-mail option, so if my users don't already have a digital document of what they want to fax, they'll need to scan it. The system is pretty bare bones, but it meets our needs.
I was hoping fax would just go away for us when we moved to FreePBX + Twilio SIP trunking, but On High requires it, and I decided that wasn't a battle worth fighting.
What about if you want faxes to go to different departments? Would you have a separate fax line for each department or is there an easier way that I'm not thinking of?
Also, turns out our Bizhub C454e has a PC Fax driver so users can just send faxes from their PC. I'm hurrying to install this now.
For that, if I used voip.ms, I'd probably have to have a separate DID for each department. I'm in a situation where that's not a requirement, and we just have one place for faxes. That being said, the aforementioned mailbox is a mail-enabled public folder, to which I've only granted access to the people in the office who would have been the people would could access faxes anyway.
Yeah that's pretty much how we have it set up now. I have a couple extra phone lines I could be using for fax to different departments...
You might want to check eGoldFax and see if they can do what you want. Folks here have spoke highly of them. Their cheapest eGoldFax plan was around $30 / month, and for our volume (or lack thereof) of faxing, the pricing didn't make sense.
oh wow, eGoldFax looks perfect. Completely cloud hosted with no hardware or software to install... thanks!
That's the way that I think most companies are going today. Not that service specifically, just fully hosted fax services. It's worth just making that whole component go away.
We just had a meeting with our printer support vendor and they want to sell us this solution involving a virtual fax server and stuff that's ballpark $8,000. I'm just silently ripping my hair out while my CIO eats it up.
So your CIO isn't even an intern level? That's basic adulting, how do people like this even get employed?
He's a friend of the owners of my company. He makes over $150k per year but he doesn't know much about IT at all. He more or less deals with businessy stuff and policies and "vendor management"... he works about 25 hours a week and is kind of a spendthrift. I can't do anything about it except try to "manage upward"..
Actually, the issue I'm seeing is that he's not doing business or vendor management - exactly the opposite.
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@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
We use RingCentral for VoIP, so faxing is included. They have 3 options for sending faxes. Emails to [email protected], through deskphone app, or printing to virtual printers installed on desktops.
We're going with a new Cisco voip and I guess they don't have a fax solution... rips hair out
Perhaps it's time to fire the first person for buying Cisco.
That would be the first step. Find the root cause of the problems.
That's my CIO who thinks Cisco is the way to go since it's Cisco. I tried telling him about Vonage and other far cheaper voip solutions but he doesn't really hear what I'm saying.
The root of the issue is whoever hired a CIO that isn't qualified to work in IT (or business.) That's not the logic of a business person.
Scott, the person who hired my company's CIO was the owners of the company. There is nobody in-between.
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@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
This is the solution we chose for faxing was using voip.ms's virtual fax service. I ported the number we were using for faxing to them. I setup E-mail to fax so inbound faxes are sent to [email protected]. You could set that to be the address of your fax E-mail group. For outbound faxing, users (who I've authorized to fax) send a message to [email protected] with an attachment. Our printer doesn't have a direct scan-to-E-mail option, so if my users don't already have a digital document of what they want to fax, they'll need to scan it. The system is pretty bare bones, but it meets our needs.
I was hoping fax would just go away for us when we moved to FreePBX + Twilio SIP trunking, but On High requires it, and I decided that wasn't a battle worth fighting.
What about if you want faxes to go to different departments? Would you have a separate fax line for each department or is there an easier way that I'm not thinking of?
Also, turns out our Bizhub C454e has a PC Fax driver so users can just send faxes from their PC. I'm hurrying to install this now.
For that, if I used voip.ms, I'd probably have to have a separate DID for each department. I'm in a situation where that's not a requirement, and we just have one place for faxes. That being said, the aforementioned mailbox is a mail-enabled public folder, to which I've only granted access to the people in the office who would have been the people would could access faxes anyway.
Yeah that's pretty much how we have it set up now. I have a couple extra phone lines I could be using for fax to different departments...
You might want to check eGoldFax and see if they can do what you want. Folks here have spoke highly of them. Their cheapest eGoldFax plan was around $30 / month, and for our volume (or lack thereof) of faxing, the pricing didn't make sense.
oh wow, eGoldFax looks perfect. Completely cloud hosted with no hardware or software to install... thanks!
That's the way that I think most companies are going today. Not that service specifically, just fully hosted fax services. It's worth just making that whole component go away.
We just had a meeting with our printer support vendor and they want to sell us this solution involving a virtual fax server and stuff that's ballpark $8,000. I'm just silently ripping my hair out while my CIO eats it up.
So your CIO isn't even an intern level? That's basic adulting, how do people like this even get employed?
He's a friend of the owners of my company. He makes over $150k per year but he doesn't know much about IT at all. He more or less deals with businessy stuff and policies and "vendor management"... he works about 25 hours a week and is kind of a spendthrift. I can't do anything about it except try to "manage upward"..
Actually, the issue I'm seeing is that he's not doing business or vendor management - exactly the opposite.
Yup.
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@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
We use RingCentral for VoIP, so faxing is included. They have 3 options for sending faxes. Emails to [email protected], through deskphone app, or printing to virtual printers installed on desktops.
We're going with a new Cisco voip and I guess they don't have a fax solution... rips hair out
Perhaps it's time to fire the first person for buying Cisco.
That would be the first step. Find the root cause of the problems.
That's my CIO who thinks Cisco is the way to go since it's Cisco. I tried telling him about Vonage and other far cheaper voip solutions but he doesn't really hear what I'm saying.
The root of the issue is whoever hired a CIO that isn't qualified to work in IT (or business.) That's not the logic of a business person.
Scott, the person who hired my company's CIO was the owners of the company. There is nobody in-between.
I didn't suggest that it was. You have an endemic problem with the business approach. Not something that can be fixed. You have two options... stop caring about doing a good job because that's not the job they want done or leave.
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@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
We use RingCentral for VoIP, so faxing is included. They have 3 options for sending faxes. Emails to [email protected], through deskphone app, or printing to virtual printers installed on desktops.
We're going with a new Cisco voip and I guess they don't have a fax solution... rips hair out
Perhaps it's time to fire the first person for buying Cisco.
That would be the first step. Find the root cause of the problems.
That's my CIO who thinks Cisco is the way to go since it's Cisco. I tried telling him about Vonage and other far cheaper voip solutions but he doesn't really hear what I'm saying.
The root of the issue is whoever hired a CIO that isn't qualified to work in IT (or business.) That's not the logic of a business person.
Scott, the person who hired my company's CIO was the owners of the company. There is nobody in-between.
I didn't suggest that it was. You have an endemic problem with the business approach. Not something that can be fixed. You have two options... stop caring about doing a good job because that's not the job they want done or leave.
Well I'm not going to stop caring because I have still been able to make a lot of difference here for the better, despite the CIO's bad habits.
I'm not leaving this company for a while as I just got the job a year ago as my first IT job as sysadmin and I've been getting a ton of invaluable experience with a massive range of IT things, big and small.
