FIRST - A SIMPLE COST COMPARISON CHART
(Which may just start you thinking about it seriously)

DESCRIPTION

The discussion that follows here will try to help you understand a bit more about what computer based fax systems are, and the types of features that are available, which we hope will help you to decide if NetCFax is the networked fax solution you are looking for.

A Reminder  As we still get asked if NetCFax can send faxes directly across the Internet.

Computerized fax system such as NetCFax and indeed all other similar systems CANNOT send the actual faxes themselves across the Internet to the intended recipient, as all faxes have of course got to be sent by making a phone call and then sending the fax down the phone line to a receiving fax system.  Otherwise its still just called EMAIL with an ATTACHMENT.

Even the various fax services you see advertising that appear to offer to let you send faxes across the internet do not actually do so. They simply let you send the fax data to them across the Internet, but at the end, THEY STILL HAVE TO MAKE THE PHONE CALL FOR YOU.

WHY DO YOU NEED A FAX SERVER (COMPUTER BASED FAXING SYSTEM)

Quite simply because handling faxes manually is pretty well outdated in most business environments today.  We discuss why we believe this is so in more detail below.

THE MANUAL SOLUTION -v- the computer based solution

Sending faxes out (Manually)

In most business networked environments today, the majority of documents that need to be faxed are mostly created on a computer using a word processor, or other data from spreadsheets, or indeed any other package that can produce the data you want to send as a fax. You may well ALSO have to use another program to let you create a cover page to accompany your fax.  Once all this has been done, the next thing is that all of the documents to be faxed MUST be printed out, (which can be both time wasting and also a potentially costly process in terms of time, paper and laser toner or printer ink cartridges).  Once these have finally been printed, you have to go to the fax machine physically, and then feed all of the pages of the document into it, enter the destination fax number, and on most occasions, wait around by the fax machine until the fax has been sent, so that you can bring the hard copy of the fax back to your desk.  You can soon realize that this entire process has probably taken at least 10 minutes of somebody's time.

Sending faxes out (Computer based system)

As discussed above, the majority of documents that need to be faxed are created on a computer using a word processor or whatever package. To convert these documents to a format that can be faxed is as simple as printing them to the special "fax printer" that we of course provide with NetCFax But instead of printing them to a printer that (slowly) produces endless pages of paper, the process of printing to the "fax printer" is of course a great deal faster, as no paper handling is required, and the output is a file that is saved on your own hard disk as a .TIF format file (All faxes are .TIF format)

You have now completed creating the basic fax, and of course you have bypassed that whole expensive and long winded printing process on a printer that is usually somewhere else in the office. Now, to send this document out as a fax with NetCFax, all you have to do is click the "Create fax now" button. If you want to send a cover page with it, fill out the cover page details, or even quickly select the recipient from your personal address book, or the servers shared address book, and then press the "Send now" button.  The NetCFax clients send all of the fax data across your network to the NetCFax server, which will of course retain a copy of it.  The fax itself is not saved on your desktop PC, but the original file(s) that you created to be faxed are still available on your PC 

The NetCFax server will handle the rest of the process totally automatically, including scheduling the fax to be sent at a later date or time if you have specified that, and naturally it will try to send it again if the call fails to get through, and it can even print it out as a paper document automatically if you want it do so.

This entire faxing process has not made you get off your chair, or leave your desk or office at all, and has very probably only taken a few minutes.

Naturally, the NetCFax server is able to let you know immediately the fax has been sent successfully, using a small popup that will only appear on your computer screen. In fact, NetCFax can even even send you a notification by email if you wish, and the original fax as sent out can be attached to that email if required.

If you have the latest NetCFax PRO+ v3.6 the faxes cabinet updates automatically when a fax is sent or fails to be sent, and also  whenever a fax is received.

Of course, the NetCFax client on your desktop PC lets you view all of your own faxes, but not other peoples unless your NetCFax login account has special administrator access rights.  You can print any of the faxes listed in your client's cabinet at any time, you can resend them if you need to, including doing so to a different recipient, and you can delete them if you wish to do so.

With NetCFax, all of this (apart from the email notifications mentioned above of course) is handled directly between the NetCFax server and the NetCFax clients using the industry standard TCP network protocol.  This means that there is no need whatsoever for you to create and send it as an email with your documents attached to it.  However, if you really want to do it that way, NetCFax can even do that, as it provides a very powerful and flexible  Email-to-Fax gateway that provides both an SMTP server, and the ability to collect (specially formatted) emails from any standard POP3 mailbox, and if they are validly formatted, it will convert these to faxes and send them automatically.

Sending faxes to a group of people (Manually)

This is a real problem with most manual fax systems, as once you have the document you want to fax printed out and ready to be sent, you then have to stand at the fax machine and either keep feeding the pages in endlessly, often changing the fax number it is to be sent to each time. Even if your fax machine does let you enter a series of fax numbers, this is still a costly and time wasting exercise .

Sending faxes to a group of people (Computer based system)

This is a lot easier to do with a computer based fax system such as NetCFax.

For really quick faxing, you can enter up to approximately 25 different recipients fax numbers in the fax number field provided, simply by separating each fax # from the next with a semi colon, and NetCFax will create and send that fax to all of them for you totally automatically.  You can even do the same with the recipients name field to "personalize" these faxes.

NetCFax provides you with the facility to allow you to easily create lists of fax recipients of any size you wish.  You can even add numbers and names to these lists from both your personal address book, and the NetCFax server's shared address book, as well as adding them in manually.

When you are ready to send a fax out to all the recipients in any of the lists that you have, you simply select that list as being the recipient(s) directly from the fax cover page details window.  Then, when you click the "Send fax now" button, the NetCFax client will automatically pass a copy of the fax and the list of all specified recipients to the server for each and every member of that list.

That's all there is to it as far as you are concerned.  The NetCFax server will handle all of the queuing of the faxes, retries if one or more of the recipients are busy or not available for any reason, which then leaves you free to get on with other, more important things, like getting out for a nice relaxing lunch break, instead of standing by a fax machine twiddling your thumbs for a significant chunk of your working day.

Receiving faxes (Manually)

When a fax comes in on a normal fax machine, it is of course printed out on paper by the fax machine  That document then has no option but to sit in the tray of the fax machine until someone notices it is there.  That person then has to read it ( a potential security problem) to see who it is for, and usually they then have to take it to wherever the recipient happens to be, wasting valuable working time walking around to different offices.

What is even worse is that any of the received faxes just may contain confidential information that you do not want various other people to see !!!

Receiving faxes (Computer based system)

You probably also want to receive faxes, and  quite naturally NetCFax can handle this for you as well - very easily.

When an incoming fax arrives, it is simply saved to the hard disk of the machine the NetCFax server is running on. The NetCFax server of course saves all the information available on that fax, including assigning it a unique fax ID number.

If you choose to take advantage of the "junk fax filter system" you can even have NetCFax automatically delete unwanted faxes based on the sending fax system's CSID.

The NetCFax server can notify any/all of the logged in fax clients of faxes being received (that have access rights to view received faxes) in a similar way to that described above for faxes that have been sent out.  The received faxes popup however, maintains a useful list of all the faxes received (until you clear it).  To view these, all you have to do is to open the received faxes drawer of fax cabinet using the NetCFax client and the NetCFax server will provide them to you on demand so that you can view them, print them or even delete them.

If you have the latest NetCFax PRO+ v3.6 the faxes cabinet updates automatically when a fax is sent successfully or it fails to be sent, and also whenever a fax is received.

If you really want it to, the NetCFax server can also print all received faxes automatically to whatever printer you wish it to use, (If you like you can think of this as being able to approximate the old fashioned way where all faxes appear in hard copy format on some printer eventually).

Received faxes can even be routed directly to the intended recipient.  A routing system is available (for anyone (with ADMINISTRATOR ACCESS RIGHTS or full received faxes access rights) that lets them view the faxes, add comments if they wish, and then route (assign) any received fax to either any specific fax login account, or even to all of the members of a fax access group.

Once a fax has been routed, the designated recipient(s) can view and work with that fax, even though they do not have access to any other received faxes.

The fax server also has many options for automated handing and routing/assigning received faxes to make this even more trivial to control.

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS (For manual systems)

If you have more than one phone line that is used for faxing, each and every phone line you have will almost certainly need to have a separate fax machine attached to it, which is a pretty significant initial purchase cost and a large maintenance/replacement overhead.

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS (Computer based system)

NetCFax will support as many modems (phone lines) as the Windows operating system can support. (This can, at least in theory, be up to 66) We do not limit how many modems NetCFax will handle simultaneously for you.

Therefore, the total hardware cost is little more than the license cost for the NetCFax program itself.  The NetCFax server will handle all of the lines totally automatically, irrespective of whether they happen to be sending or receiving faxes.

This is of course a further significant saving in costs through the use of NetCFax.

Controlling Faxes (For manual systems)

When a fax is sent using a fax machine, there is usually only a single copy which is of course on paper. These faxes have to be stored in a filing cabinet somewhere, and cannot be accessed easily if you want to check the content or even resend it.

Controlling Faxes (Computer based system)

NetCFax maintains a database of information on all of the faxes it handles, and of course, it also retains all of the faxes themselves.  These can easily be accessed at any time, from any networked PC, and reprinted, resent or of course deleted.  

What are the benefits of the direct communications between the NetCFax       Clients and the NetCFax server compared to the use of email ?                     

To be totally honest, there really are a huge number of benefits in handling your networked faxing this way. 

The first one is that to be able to use any "email only" based systems, you will of course need to have a mail server system installed on your network. This mail server system will also need to be configured and maintained.  If you do not already have a suitable mail server system, the cost of such a system can be quite significant, and you will have to reconfigure all of your networked email clients (Outlook or whatever you use) to be able to use it.

Another of the major benefits is the reduction to the amount of network traffic using your network (that is - the amount of data being passed around the network).  This is because NetCFax uses the industry standard (and Internet) TCP protocol to allow it to pass the raw data between the fax server and the fax clients directly extremely efficiently.  

But before we hear you say "so what, email systems also use TCP", you may not realize how emails have to handle all those large (fax) attachments.  For mainly historical reasons, emails can only contain what are called the 7 bit character set, which simply means that you cannot include attached files (such as those created by Word, Excel, PDF etc) in their original binary format to any email.  To get around this problem, another industry standard called MIME Encoding was established.  This converts this binary data into a special 7 bit format so that it can be included with emails.

HOWEVER the need for this type of encoding also causes the size of all the files that are to be attached to increase VERY substantially in size, an average increase being around 30-40%, which as you can see will create a significant amount of additional data that has to be sent across your network between the mail client and your email server, and then (again) between the mail server and the fax system itself.

On the other hand, NetCFax does not need to do this at all as it transfers all of the fax data directly between the fax clients and the fax server in its original binary format.  You can see how doing it this way will save 30-40% of the data transfer size, dramatically reduce the amount of traffic your network has to be able to handle at any point in time.  This is an increasingly important factor when you think about the rapidly increasing loads many networks are now having to support, such as the fast growing use for VOIP (networked telephony), remote meetings software such as NetMeeting, and the numerous "chat" systems such as AOL, Microsoft Messenger and many others. 

The NetCFax direct communication system also allows each and every desktop PC to instantly check and view any of the faxes belonging to them or assigned to them that are being held on the fax server at any time they wish to.  This includes those faxes that may still be waiting to be sent out, those that have already been sent, those that could not be sent out, and of course faxes received.   Not only can you do this from your own PC, but due to the ingenious design of NetCFax, anyone can sit down at any PC on your network that has a NetCFax client installed, login to the fax server, and check their own faxes.  This is simply not possible using an email based system for obvious reasons.

Again due to the use of direct TCP communications, the NetCFax server can be configured to store the personal address books for all login accounts.  This allows you to sit at any networked PC, login to the NetCFax server, and have your own address book details available to you automatically.

Maybe one of the most powerful benefits of the NetCFax system is that it can be used directly across the Internet just as easily as on your own network.  What this means is that a mobile user only has to connect to the internet from wherever they are in the normal way, and they can then login to the NetCFax server on your office network and work with it in exactly the same way as they would if they were sitting at their desk in the office. (Naturally, the machine that the NetCFax server is installed on has to be accessible [visible] across that Internet connection for this to be possible).

As a final bonus, both the NetCFax Pro and NetCFax PRO+ fax servers can be run as Windows Services (or as Desktop Applications) which means that even if you have a power failure or a computer malfunction, once the computer is restarted the NetCFax server will also be started automatically by Windows, so you can continue to send/receive faxes without any human intervention.

We really hope that this brief discussion has helped you understand a little more ABOUT AT LEAST SOME of the benefits a computer based networked faxing system such as NetCFax can offer you in terms of operational flexibility and the potential savings that a system like NetCFax can provide?

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