Need some help with a better fax solution
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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.
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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:
@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.
You should. It is actively bad for everyone, you and the company, if you care in a way that does not reflect the desires and values of the company. We call that "AJ Syndrome" and is very common, but very dangerous, in IT. There is no winning, it will be you who loses the most, but the company won't be happy either.
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@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
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.
That should read "I'm getting out of here as quickly as possible. I've been here a full year and already am dramatically left without mentorship and there is no upward mobility. The company doesn't care about business and my desires to do good IT work don't align with the organization."
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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:
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.
That should read "I'm getting out of here as quickly as possible. I've been here a full year and already am dramatically left without mentorship and there is no upward mobility. The company doesn't care about business and my desires to do good IT work don't align with the organization."
I'm doing this three years too late. Better now than never.
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@eddiejennings 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:
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.
That should read "I'm getting out of here as quickly as possible. I've been here a full year and already am dramatically left without mentorship and there is no upward mobility. The company doesn't care about business and my desires to do good IT work don't align with the organization."
I'm doing this three years too late. Better now than never.
You ideally want to jump the instant that you know that you lack the training and exposure you should get or that you realize your values don't align with the business.
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@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@eddiejennings 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:
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.
That should read "I'm getting out of here as quickly as possible. I've been here a full year and already am dramatically left without mentorship and there is no upward mobility. The company doesn't care about business and my desires to do good IT work don't align with the organization."
I'm doing this three years too late. Better now than never.
You ideally want to jump the instant that you know that you lack the training and exposure you should get or that you realize your values don't align with the business.
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Was just talking to someone about Twilio's Fax API. Thinking about working on it next week (adding to my Twilio project).
With a few simple curl commands you could probably create a twiml bin to do what voip.ms is doing. If you want to keep it all on Twilio.
My longer term goal is to have a dialpad.com style interface, windows desktop app or chrome app, where you can control phone and view other users status (like 3cx) but also call, text, fax.
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@bigbear said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
Was just talking to someone about Twilio's Fax API. Thinking about working on it next week (adding to my Twilio project).
With a few simple curl commands you could probably create a twiml bin to do what voip.ms is doing. If you want to keep it all on Twilio.
My longer term goal is to have a dialpad.com style interface, windows desktop app or chrome app, where you can control phone and view other users status (like 3cx) but also call, text, fax.
I just had a support ticket closed about that. The API is the only fax access they have. It don't support faxing over a SIP trunk (assuming someone would want to have their PBX handle faxing).
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@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@bigbear said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
Was just talking to someone about Twilio's Fax API. Thinking about working on it next week (adding to my Twilio project).
With a few simple curl commands you could probably create a twiml bin to do what voip.ms is doing. If you want to keep it all on Twilio.
My longer term goal is to have a dialpad.com style interface, windows desktop app or chrome app, where you can control phone and view other users status (like 3cx) but also call, text, fax.
I just had a support ticket closed about that. The API is the only fax access they have. It don't support faxing over a SIP trunk (assuming someone would want to have their PBX handle faxing).
Yes but to do the email to fax for in and out it's all you need. And a few lines of code.
Their infrastructure is incredible, they are just focused on delivering to developers the tools to build end user apps.
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We've signed up with egoldfax so thanks to the user who suggested that.
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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:
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.
That should read "I'm getting out of here as quickly as possible. I've been here a full year and already am dramatically left without mentorship and there is no upward mobility. The company doesn't care about business and my desires to do good IT work don't align with the organization."
I actually do have mentorship and there is upward mobility. Additionally, I have learned a ton on my own and I think I'm doing pretty good so far, despite some negative things. And of course my company cares about business, despite making some bad decisions in the past. Stop making such negatively absolutist statements.
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The last time I looked at the fact solution for my 700+ pages per day the cost was going to be in excess of $700 a month for a hosted solution.
This is why I kept it in the house onto a machine that I already owned saving to a network share but I could have just as easily sent it to an email group.
Monthly reoccurring fees are $30 for a pots line.
My machine has a printer driver that allows printing to fax. So there is no need to print something and walk to a machine. -
@dashrender said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
The last time I looked at the fact solution for my 700+ pages per day the cost was going to be in excess of $700 a month for a hosted solution.
This is why I kept it in the house onto a machine that I already owned saving to a network share but I could have just as easily sent it to an email group.
Monthly reoccurring fees are $30 for a pots line.
My machine has a printer driver that allows printing to fax. So there is no need to print something and walk to a machine.We do about 200 pages a month or so which is going to cost us about $30 per month and then it sounds like if we go over that, it's still quite cheap.
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@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
We do about 200 pages a month or so which is going to cost us about $30 per month and then it sounds like if we go over that, it's still quite cheap.
I'd be surprised if we've done 200 pages in the 4 years I've been with my company; thus, eGoldFax, as cool as it is, didn't make sense financially.
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@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
@dashrender said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
The last time I looked at the fact solution for my 700+ pages per day the cost was going to be in excess of $700 a month for a hosted solution.
This is why I kept it in the house onto a machine that I already owned saving to a network share but I could have just as easily sent it to an email group.
Monthly reoccurring fees are $30 for a pots line.
My machine has a printer driver that allows printing to fax. So there is no need to print something and walk to a machine.We do about 200 pages a month or so which is going to cost us about $30 per month and then it sounds like if we go over that, it's still quite cheap.
Yeah, most of those cloud-based solutions are pretty reasonable at 500 pages or less per month but my volume is so high it was completely unreasonable.
