Linked by Keith Burgess on Mon 20th Jun 2005 17:48 UTC
Tired of getting up from your desk to fax a document? Have you ever wondered why your company's call center maintains wall-sized desks of fax machines? Employees at many large organizations are asking the same questions. Fortunately, so is Biscom, Inc. While there are a few companies providing enterprise fax solutions, Biscom, in this author's opinion, stands out as the market leader.
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We're in the early stages of a central fax pilot in the local school district. But we've gone a slightly different route than the rest who have posted here. Instead of replacing fax machines and integrating faxing into the desktop OS, we've replaced fax machines with uber-photocopiers. Every school in the district has a Toshiba e650 photocopier. This beast has a harddrive inside and runs Linux, providing Samba printers / shares, IP printing, Apple printers / shares, and Novell print queues. It also allows for scan-to-email.
What we did is put HylaFAX onto a server at the board office, installed a BrookTrout fax board, and connected 7 DID lines (giving us 70 incoming phone numbers). Then we programmed all the Toshibas with templates to scan-to-email (internal faxing) and scan-to-fax (external faxing). The Toshibas are connected to our LDAP server allowing for people to send to any employee in the district via a quick e-mail search.
To send a fax, they just send a print job to the document manager on the Toshiba. They walk over to the Toshiba, open the scan-to-fax template, type in the phone number and their e-mail, and release the document. The Toshiba converts the documents to a TIFF, transmits it via e-mail to the HylaFAX server, and then it gets faxed out as a normal fax. A status message is sent back to the sender's e-mail.
Incoming faxes are routed to the HylaFAX server, where it compares the incoming number to a list of locations, converts the fax to a PDF, and then e-mails it to a school e-mail account. The secretary at the school just has to check the school e-mail account periodically.
All we paid for was a continual license for HylaFAX, the BrookTrout board, and a server. Much less than $25,000. And we save $3000 / year / fax line that we replaced (~50 sites if everything continues to work out so nicely).
The only problem is that all outgoing faxes are now relative to the location of the board office, which means that our out-of-town sites must pay long-distance charges to send faxes across the street.