fax over IP
Recently, my boss discussed with me making our work environment more cost effective. He wanted some suggestions on things that we thought would help cut expenses in the office and asked as all to come up with some ideas. Well, quite honestly, the one major expense that I knew we had was the cost of our phone and fax services. We do a lot of long distance calling and faxing, which in our business is a necessity. However, I was currently experiencing the same dilemma at home. How could I still maintain a good quality phone service and not have to spend so much per month to keep it going?
Well, fortunately I was able to solve my own personal phone bill problem and save my boss some money at the same time. The answer I found was VoIP and FoIP services. VoIP is a voice over IP service which allows you to make phone calls through your computer, no phone carrier is necessary. For a flat fee per month I was able to have unlimited calling to anywhere in the world. This would cut my current phone bills in half at the very least. They did also offer business plans which would allow our office to save a ton of money on their bills as well. While inquiring about all this, I mentioned the fact that our phone bills were also very high because in addition to making tons of long distance phone calls, we were sending a lot of long distance faxes as well. That is when the representative told me about FoIP.
FoIP which stands for fax over ip allows you to use a fax server to do all your faxing via the internet. They said that you didn't need a fax machine any longer, so no need for toner cartridges or paper or any machine at all. You can send and receive faxes over the internet, no hard copy is even necessary. You are assigned a Fax number and anyone can send you faxes to that number from any fax machine (even analog), and you don't even need a fax machine to receive it. Just go online and your fax is there waiting for you. This will even allow our sales people to send us documents and receive documents from us on their laptops, without having to run and look for one of those places with a fax machine. This will be great when they are on the road.
I brought these ideas to my boss, and he gave me a raise. He said with all the money he was about to save he could afford it.