9 October, 2010
Email is a great thing when we aren’t getting spammed with junk but what about faxing – has it died yet? Well luckily emails are helping to save the planet and do cut down (no pun intended) on the number of trees that go into fax paper. However, for many businesses faxes are still used often and relied upon for vital information. How can technology improve this? Well for some time now faxes have been able to be sent & received by a computer with what we call a 56k modem attached to a phone line. This is still the case – although we always recommend an external modem rather than internal to cut down on electrical surges from the phone line to the PC. Even for a small business with one PC this is a great solution as a copy of both the sent and received faxes can be kept on record. This also enables you to resend a fax that was sent yesterday or even 6 months ago as well as reprinting – or just viewing any fax that you have previously received. Obviously this becomes an important part of your data which should also get included in a good daily backup scheme. For larger businesses Microsoft has made this even more simple with 2008 Small Business Server whereby your sever has an external modem attached and this resource is shared to every PC on the network. With this in place every user can have access to faxing from their screen as well as access to all of the already sent and received faxes plus you can have new faxes arrive in your Outlook inbox ready for viewing alongside your normal emails. This means that you never have to print out a document just to walk over to the fax machine to send it away – instead you send it directly from your PC screen. These are all brilliant features designed to help save the planet as well as freeing up your time – unfortunately only for doing more work in some cases! Kerr Solutions is at 128 Musgrave Street & is contactable on 49 222 400.