The Truth About Fax --E-mail and voicemail aren't killing facsimile-they're reviving it

Industry pundits have long predicted the death of the facsimile machine due to the rise of E-mail and other forms of electronic communications. But recent advances in E-mail and corporate networks are instead giving the fax a new lease on life. Fax technology is being integrated into corporate LANs with links to E-mail, voicemail, document repositories, imaging systems, and wireless communications devices such as pagers.

Integrating fax with other technologies can increase productivity, reduce training costs, and lower telecom bills, according to technology managers who've integrated fax. From a data-management perspective, such integration lets information systems departments keep all corporate data in a digital format that can be backed up, replicated, and distributed to any of a variety of output devices, including the trusty old fax machine.

While fax is only one delivery option available to businesses, it remains popular: Every office has a fax of some sort, be it a fax server on the LAN, a printer with integrated fax capabilities, or a standalone fax machine. "When we have one application solution and one user interface, training is easier and faster than teaching three or four different applications," says Rob Lerner, IS manager of network software for consumer electronics vendor Sharp Electronics Inc. in Mahwah, N.J.

"Think about when TV came out," says Greg Erman, VP of sales and marketing for SoftLinx Inc., a Westford, Mass., vendor of integrated fax. "Everyone predicted the end of radio, and that didn't happen. TV just changed the way radio was used. New technologies tend to complement, rather than replace, old technologies."

There are four key trends in fax integration: the merging of text, voice, and images into a unified messaging system; enhanced fax-on-demand; voice notification of incoming faxes; and integration of fax with binary files.

The merger of text, voice, and image data into a unified system requires that fax servers be able to communicate with LAN servers, E-mail, and voicemail systems, as well as with optical scanners and optical character recognition (OCR) software.

Enhanced fax-on-demand integrates corporate databases and telephony equipment and services with fax servers. Fax-on-demand is often used in customer-service and telemarketing applications, allowing customers to call into a database, listen to a series of options, select the desired information by pressing the...