eFax services

[Syenye]

i'm thinking of getting an eFax service. does anyone have any suggestions or experiences with them?

[Aabidano]

For basic faxing they used to be handy, we've got a system where I work. Anymore almost everything that gets faxed (in my experience) also needs signed, anything that doesn't just gets emailed. Which means you need a scanner anyway so why not just get a multi function laser fax machine?

For sensitive business, personal or HR type stuff? No way unless you own the systems doing the hand off to the telephone system.

[Syenye]

good point. it's actually for my brother's business, and i'm not sure in what capacity they planned on using it. i hadn't thought of the signing bit, since i've never really used e-fax for anything but receiving.

[valryte]

For sensitive business, personal or HR type stuff? No way unless you own the systems doing the hand off to the telephone system.

And you make this statement based on what exactly?

Many companies throughout various sectors use e-faxing services and there aren't any security concerns as long as you use one of the major players out there. From banks to healthcare companies to law firms, most use them. And trust me, their security requirements are way more strict than some small company. I'm sure if a bank can trust them with a multi-million dollar transaction, I'm sure they'll be good enough for your brother. I should know, I designed and wrote an efaxing system for one of the efaxing companies. As far as faxing signed documents, yeah a scanner would be required, but then chances are if you like to archive documents electronically, like invoices, checks, mailed documents, etc... then you'll have a scanner anyways and if speed is an issue, they do make high speed scanners. Scanning a document is probably the only drawback if you can even consider that a drawback. Nowadays I rather have a electronic copy of any documents that I receive or send out. So what are the benefits? No fax machine needed. No extra telephone line needed. Never need to worry about the fax machine being busy. No paper jams. Received faxes are automatically in electronic format. Print only what you need. You can access your received faxes from anywhere over the internet. And best of all, without having to spend any money on a fax machine, you can simply sign up and try the service. If you already have a fax number, you can forward the number to one of their inbound numbers and try it out. And then if you like it, you can have your number ported to them.

As far as recommendations,

J2 aka EFax
Protus aka myfax.com
Concord

[Aabidano]

For sensitive business, personal or HR type stuff? No way unless you own the systems doing the hand off to the telephone system.

And you make this statement based on what exactly?

Many companies throughout various sectors use e-faxing services and there aren't any security concerns as long as you use one of the major players out there.

I make that statement based on the reports I see literally every day about subcontractor X losing or poorly controlling company Y's data. If you're giving control of your data to a third party there is always some level of concern. The black eye doesn't hit the subcontractors' business, the increased liability costs aren't the subcontractor's problem (if they're smart), the subcontractor isn't the one who's name is in bold in the news article. I don't work for a small business, I'm not a bean counter\actuary either so couldn't tell you what the real value of the risk is. *Edit - I can't count the number of times I've said "told you so" to various groups after the fact. In a couple of cases I've had to dig out documentation to save my butt.

For a small business it would depend on the contents and the volume of your fax traffic. For incoming faxes I can definitely see the advantages you mentioned.

[sarlen]

If your thinking about buying an in house solution Rightfax( http://www.rightitfax.com/ ) is an excellent candidate. Pricing depends on a lot of factors but realistically if your under say 20 people your looking in the sub 2k range (its been a few years since we priced it all out it could be cheaper now). We did it for a company of little over 400 people and got it done for under 15k with around 1k a year service contract.

The big advantages of this is the email integration and the ability to store signatures for out bound faxing. When you create the signature you give the admin a written sample of your signature and he can scan it in. From there the only person that can see the signature is the admin and that specific user and you can attach it any where on the document you want.

The email integration allows you to receive all of your faxes in a half dozen different formats as attachments. This works with all major email programs.

The desktop integration allows you to fax from any program that has a print function, a small box pops up asking for a few details like the number, do you want a cover page, and so on. You can also choose to attach your signature from the pop up.

[mumbo]

Depends. For personal occasioanal usage I would recommend some free services, like http://www.faxsv.com, http://www.freepopfax.com and so. For a hard faxer there are pro. services. It's matter of bundling and pricing. I never faced any technical problem with it.

[Zaelath]