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Fax – a
major medium of business communication …
Fax as a means of business communication is often
assumed to have been replaced by email many years
ago. The reality is somewhat different. Today more
than 200 million fax machines worldwide (and the
numbers are growing each year) are sending more
than 120 billion faxes annually. Fax is seen in
many cases as more secure than email and more likely
to be evidentially accepted. The synchronous nature
of fax and the difficulty of corrupting fax messages
(through hacking and other means) are both powerful
reasons why the volume of fax traffic is still
increasing and why fax is seen as a more reliable
communications medium than email. Fax documents
remain essential to business processes across all
industries.
… still processed manually
in many cases
Although huge volumes of critical business information
is sent and received via fax each day by companies
of all sizes, faxes have either not been addressed
by IT based business applications and archiving
solutions, or have only been addressed in a
very rudimentary way. Typically faxes are received
on individual physical fax machines or basic
LAN fax server solutions and not integrated
into IT based business processes.
The consequences of this deficiency are obvious:
- High labor cost due to manual operation
- Slow, error prone manual processing
- Unsecured business processes due to loss and
physical duplication of documents
- Long business cycles due to lack of automation
- Non compliance with retention regulations
The consequences of failing to comply with government
and industry regulations on fax archiving can be
highly damaging to a company’s image and
future business prospects, however this is often
overlooked in the rush to address the apparently
more obvious requirements of email.
A document management strategy
for fax
The challenges above are completely addressed by the use of FaxPlus/Open
for in-house solutions as well as for carrier based service offerings (e.g.
Deutsche
Telekom). FaxPlus/Open is seamlessly integrated with IBM’s DB2
Content Manager such that fax documents can be handled in exactly the same
way as any
other document type.
In addition the multi-platform and high-availability capabilities
of FaxPlus/Open allow it to slot into the document management strategy
adopted by the enterprise regardless of the platform used. Some of the features
helping
to make FaxPlus/Open a key component of any document management strategy
for fax include:
- Handles fax traffic of the whole enterprise
- Unlimited scalability
- Will handle the highest production fax volumes
- Optimized least cost routing for every type of enterprise
- Highest availability and reliability
- Proven industrial strength
- Integrates with virtually any application
- Exploits existing IT infrastructure
- Supporting zOS, UNIX, Linux, and Windows NT/2000
- Central System Management
- Network centric or distributed fax servers
- Direct Carrier connection
- Rapid Return on Investment
- SAP certified
- Many references and Success Stories
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