Send Fax From Email On Your Computer or Smartphone

Remember the fax machines of yore? Yes, the ones with the rolls of thermal paper. Those fax messages always had kind of a funny feel to them and the nasty habit of fading over time. So, the thing to do was take your incoming fax messages and copy them onto plain paper with a laser printer. Then go wash your hands to get rid of that icky feeling.

Fax has come a long way since its early roots. Thermal paper has gone the way of photostatic copies. Even the ubiquitous business fax machine is now an endangered species. What’s replacing it? Electronic transmission and storage in the cloud, of course.

The thing to do now is send and receive fax messages via email. At first glance, this seems like one step too many. Since email can send and receive messages just fine on its own, what do you need fax for?

Fax messaging is still a staple of many business processes. The term “fax” is short for “facsimile.” A facsimile means an exact copy of something. Think of fax machines as copiers that are hooked together over a telecommunications link. Whatever you load into one machine comes out as a copy on the other.

This is the value of fax messages. It’s a way of sending copies of business documents with original signatures and hand written notations across long distances. Fax was originally implemented as a replacement for messenger services and overnight mail. An exact copy of the original document has more business value than a message about what is in the document.

Many businesses still have and will keep their stand-alone fax machines. Home office users and smaller operations may use an “all-in-one” printer that doubles as a copier and fax machine. What about when you are away from the office? You can’t haul that beast in the back seat of the car, can you? The traditional workaround has been to visit an office supply store or other business that offers fax service to send or receive a message. Now you can skip all that and use your smartphone or laptop computer.

Yes, it is possible to cram a fax machine into your iPhone or Android smartphone. Well, in the form of an app, anyway. How does it do the scanning? With your phone’s camera. You simply take pictures of your document pages and then send them to the fax number of your choice. You can create a cover sheet right on the phone if you need one. At the other end, the document copy comes rolling out of the office fax machine with no one the wiser that you’ve done it all on your smartphone.

You can also receive fax messages on your smartphone. In fact, with any computer and a broadband connection you can both send and receive faxes from the office, the coffee shop or wherever you happen to be. You send faxes as email attachments. You also receive faxes as email attachments. The person or company sending you the fax dials a local or toll free phone number that is just for your faxes. Their machine sends out the fax message and you receive it as an email attachment.

Would you like the freedom and versatility of doing your business faxing via the Internet? If so, then you’ll be interested in a free 30 day trial of paperless faxing by email. The software you’ll need for your computers is free to download. Be sure to also get the smartphone app for the ultimate in mobile faxing.

Cloud Computing For Disaster Recovery

It’s been quite a year for natural disasters. Fires scorching thousands of acres at a time, rivers overflowing their banks, torrential rainfall, tornadoes everywhere. Are you feeling a little nervous that your business could be taken out at any time?

Sadly, an unfortunate twist of fate can hit anyone at any time. You probably already have some protections in place, such as property insurance, tape or disk file backups and maybe even offsite storage of important files. Ask yourself this, however. How will you get your business back running immediately after a catastrophic local disaster?

While having copies of critical documents and customer files may prevent you from going out of business permanently if disaster strikes, they aren’t enough to keep you running without a hiccup. For that you need backup infrastructure as well as files. A generation ago, that meant duplicate data centers that were located far apart. The idea is that the kind of disaster that wipes out your facilities is unlikely to hit two geographically separated areas simultaneously. If you are prone to earthquakes, one data center can be local but the other must be in an earthquake free zone. The same thing applies to hurricanes. If you are on the coast, your backup must be far inland.

Today’s disaster recovery solution of choice is the cloud. With infrastructure, platform and software as a service, you can do anything in the cloud that you would do in-house. The advantage is that the cloud is often far, far away.

Why choose a cloud solution over doing it all yourself? Avoidance of enormous capital investment is a very good reason. It’s not hard to spend millions creating the environmentally controlled and secure facilities with robust backup power and multiple diverse bandwidth connections, not to mention the racks and racks of equipment inside. This is one reason why many businesses decide that regular system backups are good enough. If the worst happens, they’ll simply get an insurance settlement and order replacement equipment. Oh? How long will that take? Just what is your income stream going to look line in the ensuing days, weeks or months?

One advantage of the cloud is that it scales fast. You could decide to have a minimal cloud solution implemented right now for the monthly fee it takes for storage and limited server capacity. If you get knocked out where are, you can log-into the cloud from wherever you can get a broadband connection and scale up in minutes or hours. When the crises is over, you can back off from all the virtual servers and go into a standby mode.

By the way, that cloud storage makes an excellent backup for your local files. Cloud storage is robust and almost infinitely scalable. This alone can be the justification for having a backup operation in the cloud.

What if you are in the cloud already? It’s not unknown for cloud systems to suffer outages just like anything else technical. In this case you may want to have a minimal backup system locally, in a colocation facility or set up as a private cloud in a different data center.

Hosted PBX phone systems can also keep you running after a disaster, almost like nothing ever happened. At least that’s the way your customers will perceive. it. You only need a network bandwidth connection and a few SIP phones to get your calls and voicemail. Being a network voice system, those SIP phones can be located just about anywhere... even somewhere else in the country.

Are you apprehensive that your business may not be protected from shutdown as much as you’d like? It may not be that expensive to have backup computing and telephone service in the cloud. Check options and prices now and rest easier that you have a recovery solution.

Document Digital Signature Made Fast and Easy

Are you frustrated because you have business documents you need to send for signature? It’s a pretty old school process, isn’t it? You have to print copies, mail them, wait for your client to sign and then send the completed documents back via return mail. It takes a long time, costs a bundle in postage, and generally brings business to a crawl. What if you could accomplish in minutes what might otherwise take days or weeks? What if you could try it for free?


This is the world of digital signature. You wouldn’t think of requiring someone to put on a powdered wig and use a quill pen dipped in an inkwell. So why are you stuck in the past century with mail and FAX? Especially since so many people don’t even have a FAX machine. If they every had one, they unplugged it at the same time they unplugged their typewriter. Today it’s all about desktop, laptop and notebook PCs, iPads, iPhones, Blackberries and the like. These people don’t want to go hunting for pen and paper. They want to mouse and swipe and be done with it in minutes. Now you can enable them to sign your documents electronically, quickly and easily.

The service you want is called RightSignature. It’s a sophisticated way to send documents for signature online. Here’s how it works. You choose a document from your favorite web application, select a Google Doc or upload a PDF or Word file. Then enter the name and email of each signer that you need on the document. Write a short subject and message and click to send. You can also add text fields, check boxes, initials boxes and other form fields that you need to recipients to complete. For many documents this will take you all of about a minute.

Your recipients are automatically notified via email that you’ve sent them a document for signature. They click on a link and are taken to the online document. They read it over and then sign. How? There are several methods that all work well. Most recipients just use their mouse to write their signature. You can also enable an option for signers to type their names to create a valid electronic signature. There’s a RightSignature iPhone App available free in the App Store so that iPhone users can sign by just using their finger on the touchscreen. Business users may sign on their BlackBerry. Even retro users who want a pen and paper solution can print out the signature page, sign it, and fax it back to RightSignature in order to execute the document.

Are these signatures valid? In this electronic age ESIGN and UETA laws have established the legal validity of electronic signatures in the US, and similar legislation has been passed in many other nations. Check out these laws to satisfy yourself that electronic signatures will work for your needs.

Your document has been signed by all parties and now it’s available for you to download as a PDF. Each signer and cc is automatically sent an email with that PDF document as an attachment. Each signed document also includes a Signature Certificate with contains signer information, an audit log and a unique identification number.

How much does this all cost? Probably less than what you are spending on copying and postage now, not to mention the waiting time you’ll avoid with digital document signatures. If you have a need to send out documents for signature and are curious if this solution will work for your business, take a 5 document free trial. No credit card is needed. Get started in just seconds. You may forget what a pen even looks like.

FAX On The Run

Facsimile or FAX has been the preferred way to transmit and receive business documents that can't wait for mail service. Large companies have fax machines that look more like huge copy machines. They can automatically load, transmit and reassemble documents automatically. Small office users often have a fax machine bundled with a scanner and printer in an "all-in-one" device. But all of these facsimile devices have one thing in common: They tie you to the office.

Well, no more. The next evolution of the fax machine is Internet fax. Imagine being able to both send and receive fax messages on your laptop computer from anywhere you have Internet service. That includes WiFi hotspots, hotels, airports, or roaming with cellular broadband service. That capability is available now at a very reasonable cost.

The beauty of FAX is that it is like a long distance copier. You put a piece of paper in a slot at one location. It comes out of another slot seconds later hundreds or thousands of miles distant. Fax messages can be text, graphics, copies of other documents, or hand scribbled notes on any of these. This is what makes fax more powerful than email or IM. But a combination of fax and email is the most powerful solution of all.

Here's a mobile service designed for personal and business faxing on the go. There is a choice of plans with pricing that starts under $4 a month. You can send and receive faxes from anywhere with an Internet connection. It stores and archives your messages for up to six months. It's priced something like a cellular plan in that you get 50 incoming or outgoing pages per month. After that there is a small overage fee per page. Heavier users can get larger plans with up to 250 pages sent or received per month.

If you've ever had to hang around a hotel front desk waiting for faxes documents from the home office that you need to support your business trip, you know what pain fixed location faxing can be. Much better to be sipping a latte and checking your email when the faxed documents are sent directly to your laptop.

In addition to the convenience and mobility, there is a "green" aspect to Internet-based fax services. You avoid the toner and paper, especially the special thermal coated paper used by some older fax machines. If and when you need a hard copy, you can print them from your computer. If you only need to read and file the documents, then going electronic saves both cost and waste.