All About FoIP Blog

Today's paper intensive vertical markets are produce, government, healthcare, financial, legal, education and banking. Each sector contains one or more components which are regulated, requires communication with a variety of disparate organizations and paper production is mandatory. As the economy decides whether or not to recover, these markets are moving forward aggressively to reduce manual business processes, infrastructure and IT costs,through the Cloud, Server Virtualization and other means.

In 2011, there was plenty of buzz surrounding the release of RightFax 10, the first full RightFax release since OpenText acquired Captaris several years prior. The results are coming in and previous RightFax clients looking for long needed under the hood improvements received their wish and more. Also in 2010, OpenText also acquired one of the worlds leading fax server vendors with Message Manager Solutions.

Dialogic Brooktrout SR14O is a dominate Fax Over IP software technology. It continues to participate in redefining the fax over IP transport solutions in a voice over IP built world. Dialogic Brooktrout is also an innovator with its other lines of business which include session border controllers, (SBC's) Media Gateways and more.

On Oct 5, 2011, a technology maverick, marketing genius, warrior, and one of my dearest role models was lost. While reading the republished article "The Tale of Steve Jobs and the Five Dragons" (follow link below for access to the full story), I flashed back on my career in the fax server technology industry with pride and accomplishment.  In 2011, fax technology once again picks up speed at an astonishing rate.  Fax has evolved to find its place in the new era of Unified Messaging, Unified Communications, IP communications, Cloud computing and transactional document capture and delivery.  Rumor has it, Google and Microsoft both still use and need fax for a variety of business communications and processes.  The naysayers of the future of fax, both within the industry itself, and outsiders who don't have a clue, are unaware that their negative psychological investments, blogs and white paper omissions will never defeat such a simple and smart technology with words.  Comparatively so, it is not unlike the naysayers of Apple and NeXT who nearly wrote Steve Jobs and his ventures off in the 90's. The difference between naysayers and Steve Jobs is Vision.......

For years we have been offering Rebates on upgrades to your Brooktrout and Dialogic Communications products.  This year we are at it again with the promotion to facilitate your easy transition from hardware based solutions to Fax over IP and the Cloud.  To take advantage of the Board 2 Boardless Campaign, contact One Touch Global Technologies, Inc. at 800-233-3619 (www.otgt.com).  Here are the details of the program.....

AllAboutFoIP.com, the #1 enterprise FoIP technology information resource on the internet announces Q3 launch of TMCNET.COM Fax Server Channel. The TMCNET.COM channel scheduled to launch in August will help AllAboutFoIP.com continue its mission of increasing FoIP industry awareness and value to vendor partners, IT specialists, VoIP and Telecom resellers, IP Communications consultants, Service providers and their clients…..

 

Speaking from the perspective of a 20 year fax industry veteran and company founder, One Touch Global credits RightFAX as a key influence in its history and substantial participation surrounding the fax server space through 2011 and beyond.  Fax technology, now morphing gradually away from stand alone fax machines, finds its futuristic home using digital on-ramp solutions, multifunction devices, and IP Telephony (IPT).  In other words, electronic fax remains deceptively successful and highly relevant for years to come.

The RightFAX brand continues to stand out, namely a by-product of .....

 

It is 2011, and faxing in the healthcare market continues to check out in great shape as hospitals, insurers, payment processors, laboratories, and medical product manufacturers all use fax servers and fax services to move documents confidentially.  With fax servers and fax services, documents typically arrive in secure fax to e-mail or fax client applications, or directly into healthcare management systems, so no one can read patient information except authorized users.  Fax immediately converts paper documents into electronic documents at the source.

One debate that arises in many enterprises is whether the business wants to use a FoIP (fax over IP) server or hosted Internet fax service. This debate turns on the performance of servers versus services and on the relative costs for each, along with how important the information on the faxes is.

In the abstract, fax servers and fax services do the same things. They enable businesses to send, receive and manage faxes. But in the real world, differences do exist. First, FoIP servers generally can do more than typical hosted fax services. FoIP servers generally boast a number of APIs (application programming interfaces) which means that businesses can customize the fax servers to work tightly with any of their applications. Second, more FoIP servers support production faxing (the ability to send out a batch of faxes and have every one be different in its specifics, so thousands of invoices or purchase orders can be sent out automatically), whereas this kind of capability is a rarity among fax services, which also generally don’t provide security on their lines. Also, FoIP servers generally have tighter integration with various external systems, like Microsoft Sharepoint for instance.

Many organizations have adopted a VoIP (Voice over IP) network infrastructure, or in some cases began a partial transition from traditional phone lines to IP, and thus are already reaping the 5 primary benefits of a unified communications strategy. A unified communications strategy involves the migration of primary business communication methods such as voice, data, video and fax from traditional analog phone lines onto an IP-based network, including the internet. Terms commonly used as a part of these unified communication migrations are VoIP (voice over IP) & FoIP (fax over IP).

Fax machines, fax servers and fax services continue to evolve towards a Fax over IP (FoIP) strategy, and FoIP will become the future of fax communications. As the Fax over IP (FoIP) industry matures, Fax over IP (FoIP) will become cheaper, faster, and easier to use, while dramatically enhancing consolidation and business continuance initiatives.

While there are thousands of sites and products dedicated to understanding voice transmission over an IP network (VoIP) and the internet, there are very few which discuss Fax over IP (FoIP). As a key fax server industry advocate, fax insider and reseller for 20 years, the goal of the "All About FoIP" website is to provide valuable information regarding Fax over IP (FoIP) for business executives and technology professionals to make well informed decisions.