Faxing Software - Self Hosting Selfishness

An alternative choice when it comes to the fax machine, which still proves popular in some areas, is to use a self-hosted dedicated computer to run a piece of faxing software.When fax modems arrived, any computer with a serial interface was given the power to send and receive fax transmissions. In theory, this was fantastic. It carried the meaning that any home or office gained the ability to enjoy the benefits of faxes, without the requirement to invest in a standalone fax device.However, many users found that the software that powered the fax modems was bug ridden and very user unfriendly!It is only two years ago when I was employed by a business that needed the supposed benefits of faxing software for the digital storage of signed contracts.You may noticed I said "supposed" benefits. This is because the software, despite being from a respected company who provide one of the most well known anti-virus programs in the world, crashed constantly and corrupted data all the time
. The faxing software was intended to receive and save images of faxed contracts, but the data corruption led to them being lost more often than not.We changed the machines a few times. We changed the software a few times. But we repeatedly found that we were going back to the old fax machine, taking the freshly received fax, SCANNING it into the PC, finally saving as a PDF. As you can probably understand, it kind of defeats the purpose of fax software when it comes to this sort of thing, even from "reputable" software vendors.Today, we still find ourselves in the position where many self run faxing software programs are not very reliable, and reliability is a core business requirement.But if you can locate a solid piece of software with a good scanner, a self hosted computer based faxing system can be formidable. It combines the best of modern optical imaging with the matter transporter-like ability of a fax machine and the storage that we used to with computers.And yet, yo
u do have to consider whether systems such as those above have been surpassed by capturing a paper document as a PDF file to email it to your recipient. Maybe faxes are only still in use because we still want to keep compatibility with those who haven't let go yet?

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