The New Fax Machines of the Internet Age
By Jeremiah Fowler

About a half decade ago, office managers around the world expected the company’s fax machine to fade away, being replaced by the hybrid print/scan/copy machines that churn out pages with laser quality at precision speeds. Supporting the fax machine’s demise is e-mail, a tool that instantly transmits documents and supports marketing functions in many new ways than fax machines ever could.

As the veritable dinosaur of your office equipment, this scenario shows that the fax machine will follow the adding machine and the typewriter to the office graveyard. Or does it? With the latest technological advances, this scenario has failed to come to pass

“The fax machine isn’t phasing out,” says Jeremiah Fowler, owner of BusinessNeedz.com, an online retailer of office equipment. “Basically, it’s just adapting to the newer standards of today’s business.”

Faxes are still essential office tools that allow you to fax forms, documents and contracts. Anything with your signature would likely need to be faxed. And that’s not all. Today’s technology retains the same functions of traditional fax machines, but adds an entirely new array of features.

Fully functional keyboards, color LCD displays, LAN connection capability and fax over IP top the tech list. The resulting fax machines turn hard copies into TIFF files and e-mail them as attachments, allow for network faxing, enable PC faxing and reroute incoming faxes to your computer.

Perhaps the most outstanding of the new technologies is the broadband enabled fax machine, which is another in a long line of electronic devices going online. These new fax machines connect to the internet, but stick with tradition and connect to standard telephone lines, too.

This dual functionality enables you to send and receive ordinary faxes like a normal fax machine because of the land-line connection. Plus you can send documents to any e-mail address in seconds because of the high-speed connection.

In short, put the paper in the document feeder, enter the e-mail address on the keyboard, press the send button. The fax machine converts the document into a TIF or a PDF file, attaches it into an e-mail and sends it out to your destination. It can even send two-sided faxes. It stores commonly used email addresses and phone numbers.

Being networked throughout the office, workers can send documents from any networked computer with an ordinary Web browser. Anyone who travels a great deal won’t miss out on any important faxes because they can be sent directly to an e-mail address.

“These fax machines also provide a level of security that other electronic media doesn’t,” says Fowler. “The security function lets you create password-protected faxes that require a user to enter a password to print the document on the receiving end.”

With all of these features and functions, it’s easy to see that fax machine technology is growing, not dying.