Need some help with a better fax solution
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My company still uses fax as we send and receive a decent amount per day. We email documents as much as we can but we still have to use fax.
Currently, we have one fax line coming through POTS. When we get faxes, our printer/scanner/fax system just converts the fax to pdf and mails it to the company fax email group. When people need to send a fax, they are manually printing, scanning and faxing.
I know there are solutions that let you send a fax right from your computer but I haven't dove into the research yet. We are also in the process of getting a new voip system (old one is very old and messed up) and I would like to make use of that with our fax situation so users can get faxes to their email.
Also, let me just say up front that I don't want this to devolve into everyone criticizing why we are still using fax or something.
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@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:
My company still uses fax as we send and receive a decent amount per day. We email documents as much as we can but we still have to use fax.
Currently, we have one fax line coming through POTS. When we get faxes, our printer/scanner/fax system just converts the fax to pdf and mails it to the company fax email group. When people need to send a fax, they are manually printing, scanning and faxing.
I know there are solutions that let you send a fax right from your computer but I haven't dove into the research yet. We are also in the process of getting a new voip system (old one is very old and messed up) and I would like to make use of that with our fax situation so users can get faxes to their email.
Also, let me just say up front that I don't want this to devolve into everyone criticizing why we are still using fax or something.
Receiving the faxes straight to PDF is simply. Any PBX or fax service can do that.
It is the sending of faxes that is always a pain in the ass and the needs of the individual business has to determine what will work for that.
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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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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...
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@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.
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@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!
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@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.
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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:
@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.
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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.
