25th August 2018
Let’s Get Down to the Fax
What fax machine? I can remember having a day off from Baralaba High School because Dad & Mum needed to make a special trip in to Rockhampton to purchase a fax machine – which was urgently needed at the time to transfer some business documents. Now, there are a lot of high schoolers that would say that they had never even seen a fax machine.
I remember it screeching and beeping and then going about sending a dozen pages miraculously down the line to what I imagined would be the same looking machine somewhere in Brisbane. The whole process took several minutes and resulted in a STD (Subscriber Trunk Dialling – in case you were wondering) call charge, but it got the message across. Now we service thousands of business customers and I know of just a handful that still use faxes.
There is little wonder why faxes are becoming so obsolete as emails offer so much more. In comparison to faxes, emails can convey colour, they can accurately send a picture, they can be sent to one or hundreds of recipients in a split second, they don’t add to any phone bill and they can be reproduced or returned or forwarded without any loss in quality.
Faxes were usually sent and received from just the one central device within the office however, with the latest developments in Internet enabled devices we often find ourselves with more than one device that we receive and send emails from. This is not so bad if we have a web-based email address like Gmail or YahooMail but it can create havoc when we have a computer based email such as a POP3 or SMTP account.
With the later mentioned above people run into trouble with finding a ‘sent’ item which can vary from device to device. E.g. You could reply to an email from your phone and then later think that the reply was from your PC, and subsequently not be able to find it. Other challenges are having to delete a junk email individually from every device that received it. Enter Office 365.
Microsoft offers an email hosting facility under their Office 365 banner which is easily the industry’s best managed email service for both private and business users alike. It offers many features such as best of class anti-spam and anti-virus with one of the best features being the constant syncing of all sent and received and deleted items across your entire set of email devices.
Prior to cyclone Marcia we hosted our own kerrsolutions.com.au emails here at our service centre, however with a power outage that lasted a week – we also lost an entire weeks’ worth of email communication (not good for an IT company). Immediately after Marcia we made the move from our own hosting of emails to the Office 365 system and have not had a single glitch since.
We have also shifted the vast majority of our customers across to this system and again the feedback and resulting experience has only been positive. If you are about to setup a new email address or new business, or if you are striking any problems with your existing email setup then I would not hesitate to go with Office 365.
Future Byte Me topics can be emailed to [email protected] and Bruce is contactable at Kerr Solutions, 205 Musgrave Street or on 49 222 400.
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