Fax facts

New Mexico Business Journal, Feb, 1994

If you're in a business requiring a lot of information by fax or answering machines, you already know the dilemma.

Coming back to your office -- or your home office -- and finding that scrolls of paper have spewed out of your fax machine sometime in the last day or so.

The knotty problem is that perhaps a lot of those telephonic-fax messages should have received immediate attention and response -- when you didn't even know it had arrived.

Even tougher is the "moving target" syndrome -- you're on one end of the country and a client at the other end of the country is trying to fax information direct to you.

Shazzam! There is light at the end of the tunnel.

Answering machines with faxes are a solution to these problems.

Equally enticing is a new breed of fax services offered by telecommunications companies, long-distance services and regional telephone companies, according to Home Office Computing Magazine.

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Faxes today indeed can be remotely retrieved from answering machines or through telecommunications services.

EMI's SmarterFax Mailbox Manager and Macronix's Vomax can both make life easier for you; so can AT&T and US West Fax Mail and Bell Atlantic FeatureFax; and Bell-South is getting into the act.

SureFax of Cable and Wireless Communications in Vienna, Va., is another choice, as is Envoy Global.

Home Office Computing Magazine reports that experts say because the services are still relatively new, the user will have many questions to stumble through. To begin with, a user needs to assess just how easy it is for senders to get faxes through. Will senders know they are communicating with an electronic mailbox instead of a standard fax machine?

The user must know whether a sender will have to use a menu system or enter special codes to reach the mailbox and whether the current computers, fax/modems and software will handle the job.

The user must decide whether the mailbox has its own fax number, or still use the standard fax system while the mailbox is engaged when the user is out of the office.

How will the user be notified that a fax has come through? A call from the user to check, or a paper to notify them? And what would be the extra cost if special notification is needed?

Users also must decide whether they travel enough each month to justify a fixed monthly payment, or would a usage-only system be better? Can they justify a toll-free number for retrieval?

If involved in international trade and services, the user must also determine if the selected service can tie in and use international sending and retrieval. Rival long-distance providers such as MCI and US Sprint hadn't joined the mushrooming innovative market as of last September, but analysts say there is little doubt they will, according to Home Office Computing.