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Test Drive Online Fax Services First

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If you don’t think you need an online fax service because (a) you have a fax machine or (b) you always use e-mail, phones or the Internet, then you might need to back up a step or two and read the articles about why fax technology still survives (and where). The fact of the fax, frankly, is that it is still used in many areas where people cannot get an Internet provider, such as large swaths of Africa and Asia. Whether you use a fax machine or not, plenty of people do. If they represent potential customers of yours, you are missing possible sales. It does not matter what you use to connect with other folks that are totally plugged into the new communications channels. What matters is having a way to connect to all the others who rely on fax machines.

So, now that you are back from reading up on why you really do need an online fax service, let us take a look at the real-world scenario for how to decide on a service. There are many services available with very different ranges of offerings and different ideas on what kind of service and features you need. There is not just a single reputable, reasonably-priced service, but a number of them, run by honest and hardworking people. By the same token, there are bound to be a number of scammers and disreputable folks running online fax firms, too. The best way to figure out what the right service is for you and your needs is to take advantage of the various free trial offers.

Make a plan

Before you even hit the search engines to find out where the free offers are for the most positively reviewed online fax services, you need to have a clear picture of your individual and/or corporate fax use. Since most services measure in- and out-bound traffic by the month, you should make sure your own usage figures are for 30-day periods. You also need to account for your use (or not) of cover pages, the kinds of attachments you will send, the location (local, national, international) of the recipients and other particulars of your use. This is the only way to control the cost variables and compare apples to apples at the end of the test period(s).

Now you are ready to go find out where the free trial offers are located. Search on the obvious terms and phrases and start compiling a list. Make sure to note the charges, whether per-page or per month, as well as any over-limit charges for the firms that offer a set number of in/out pages per month. Do not forget to add information in your growing collection of online fax service notes about customer service offerings (chat, phone, e-mail) and the hours they are available. Once you have a complete description of how each firm operates and what they offer, you can start your test drives.

Get different opinions

Now, you probably do not have time to do a 30-day trial for all five or six (or 10) online fax services you listed, and this is not necessary, either. Get several different employees, if they are available (or family if you work at home), to start using different services to do normal daily faxing. Keep notes about how the service works, how long it takes, the quality of the documents arriving to the recipient and so on. As the days go by, you will begin to collect a great deal of information on the different firms and should start to get a picture of the leading ones. The inferior offerings will also be evident early on, and they can be eliminated from your list of possible winners.

Make sure that all the different kinds of attachments that you need to send are translated and delivered correctly. Check with the recipient after each one is sent, to ensure that the Excel spreadsheet came out right or the Word document arrived properly formatted. Most leading services support the major office applications and graphics formats, but real-world testing is the best way to confirm that your employees and customers are getting what they need from the service.

Bottom line

It should not take more than a week or so for a few winners to start separating themselves from the pack. You will find the best services smooth, transparent, simple to use and hard to confuse. Take the several best performers and crunch the numbers for their costs and features, and you will likely arrive at one or two perfect fits. Talk to the other users at your firm (if any), and your fax-machine-using recipients, about which service worked the best. In case of ties, you can use your favorite tie-breaker (coin flip, rock-scissors-paper, etc.) and still feel pretty good about whichever service gets the nod.

MetroFax is a leader in fax to email service solutions for any sized business. Less expensive and more reliable than traditional fax services – you’ll enjoy the convenience and well as the cost. Visit us today for more information on our small business and corporate fax solutions

Online Faxing And OCR

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When you send an outgoing online fax and attach a computer file (word processing, graphics or spreadsheet), you rely on the service to translate the attached document into the correct form for output on the recipient’s fax machine. Leading services will offer this capability for a wide range of document types, including many of the most popular office applications and most common graphics formats. But what about the other direction?

When you receive files via your online fax service, they are usually TIFF or JPEG images. You can print these out, certainly, but what about integrating them into your digital work flow? This is where OCR (Optical Character Recognition) programs come into play. Following receipt of your online fax, you can use OCR programs to interpret the image and present you with editable text that you can integrate into your work flow. For the very high-tech-savvy (programmers and software engineers), it is even possible to design and implement systems that can automatically perform OCR functions on incoming faxes.

Fax use around the globe

Some may wonder why you do not just ask the sender to e-mail you the file. Certainly this would save some steps, but the fact is that not everyone in the world has e-mail. Especially in certain parts of the world, the infrastructure for the Internet has not spread as far as telephone service has. Phone service needs to be dependable (and what is called fault-tolerant) to carry modem signals for computers and connect you to the Internet. The demands made by fax machines and telephones are very much less, and you only need a good connection for a few minutes at a time. This is why fax machines are used in the tens of millions around the world.

It is far less costly, and less time-consuming, to develop a strategy for converting faxed documents to editable ones than to lobby for better communications infrastructure in rural areas, foreign lands and far-flung places. The ability to use OCR technology means the solution is here right now, and a good online fax service can advise you as to how you can implement various solutions. The fact is, it can be done any number of ways.

SaaS or local programs

SaaS (Software as a Service) is a Web-based way of providing software solutions from what we are now calling the cloud. The cloud simply refers to all the computing resources out there in the virtual world that can be shared and used by anyone in the world with an Internet connection. Therefore you don’t even need to have OCR software installed, as you can access it from your Web browser. All you need to do is upload the faxed file per the instructions and you will get editable text returned to you, either in a new window, via a download or by e-mail.

If you prefer to keep your applications local, there are a variety of programs that range from no-cost and low-cost to robust commercial packages. The one that works best for you will be a process of trial and error, perhaps, but you can take comfort in the fact that OCR is a mature technology and even freebie solutions can hold their own in the corporate work flow. Sometimes an OCR program needs to learn about the particular typeface and layout used in scanned documents (which are what fax machines produce and send). This is neither a lengthy nor difficult process these days, however.

Scan and scan again

In effect, an OCR program does virtually what a fax machine does physically, that is, it scans documents. This should suggest a solution that you may have in-house already, and it involves your desktop scanner (if you have one or more). These devices all come with OCR programs specifically created for scanned documents, and that is what faxes produced by fax machines are, in essence. You should install any OCR program that you do have and put it through its paces. You may find that you have a solution for fax-to-text that you already own.

Whether it is done in the cloud or on the receiving end, there is no reason you cannot integrate editable text from faxes into your digital work flow. Yes, it is simpler to deal with files that people can attach to e-mails, as they will open up right in their native applications (whether Word, WordPerfect or what-have-you). However, the point is, you need to be prepared to handle incoming documents from everywhere and everyone.

Bottom line

If you do international business, you already know that plenty of people in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and elsewhere are still using fax machines as their primary business connection. It does not take that much time or effort to process their documents into usable form, and until they get dependable Internet service, this is a process you will need to perform from time to time.

Metro Hi Speed is a leader in email fax solutions for any sized business. Less expensive and more reliable than traditional fax services – you’ll enjoy the convenience and well as the cost. Visit us today for more information on our small business and corporate fax solutions.