Faxes represent unalterable, legally binding documents that are essential for business processes, such as invoicing, purchasing, finance, legal, and supply chain management. Compared to email, fax communications are more tamper-resistant, more secure, and provide more reliable delivery and notification options. To manage the high volume of inbound and outbound faxes that are part of normal business activities, organizations have relied on the horsepower of a client-server based network or enterprise fax server.

Users anywhere on the network, whether local or remote, can access the fax server through a variety of thick or thin clients or via email and messaging applications, such as Microsoft®, Outlook®, or IBM® Notes®. In addition, some fax servers are capable of extracting data from host or mainframe applications and automatically delivering thousands of invoices or purchase orders to individual recipients.

As a result, the network-based fax server is the hub of many document-centric business applications and is considered a mission-critical application for a variety of reasons including the ability to:

• Provide proven, reliable, and secure electronic document delivery, receipt, tracking, and management
• Reduce costs
• Increase efficiency with smart process flows for creating, receiving, routing, reviewing, and approving documents
• Integrate with essential business applications, such as CRM, document management, email, ERP, workflow, and host systems, as well as multifunction printer (MFP) devices
• Centralize and distribute fax services across the enterprise, including remote locations
• Support compliance and regulatory requirements by offering tamper-resistant document delivery and audit trail
• Offer high-availability fax services, complete with redundancy and failover capabilities