Transporting Scanned Documents Environmentally Sound and Saving Money At The Same Time

Are you still sending masses of paper documents via FAX so they can be put on paper at the receiving side in order to get filed or thrown away?

When FAX was the only convenient way to send a paper document to another place for further processing, telecommunication companies cherished the income, it’s a slow process at a minute a page or more and very lucrative for a telecom provider.

Today, there are better ways of doing that, using a device called a Document Sender. A document sender allows the scanned document to be either sent electronically as an email or a FAX, so if your recipient still lives in the old world of FAX machines, you can send it there.

If you send it in your own organization or to a modern recipient, you probably would want to send it as an e-mail, firstly it is a lot faster, secondly it does not cost you anything if you already have an Internet connection anyway.

Some simple numbers: Sending 20 pages a day from Austin, Texas to Philadelphia via FAX at US$0.10 per minute costs you annually US$400.00 on the sending side, plus US$50 for maintenance of the FAX machine and US$30 of power (approximately 30 Watts) for standby. A Document Sender normally consumes less than 10 Watts of power in standby.

Document Sender Appliances can normally take a large range of Industry Standard USB Scanner Devices, that allow you to select the right scanner capabilities and price. With FAX machines you are limited to the standard FAX paper format, with scanner devices you can select the appropriate format.

A ‘Document Sender’ is, what I call a convergence device. As with a dedicated Fax Receiver Appliance the Dedicated Document Sender Appliance will significantly reduce the amount of printed paper in or across organizations, as well as further speed-up the information flow and delivery.

State of the Art document senders allow you for each user to set up an individual address book for email or fax numbers and require the user to identify at the document sender before the device can be used. This way nobody can maliciously email or fax a document on behalf of someone else.

In environments such as Legal, Government or Medical where there are strict rules on what documents get sent where, a Document Sender appliance is a perfect fit as it can be configured and managed centrally to enforce policies and whatever controls are mandated.

If so required, a Document Sender can store to a central service running on a PC or a server, so that who emailed what to whom and when can be registered in a central database and can be retrieved as necessary for analysis.

The savings in power, paper, speed of delivery, accountability and access control to your company resources are all powerful arguments to use Document Sender appliances instead of a FAX machine. All these reasons combine and make the use of such a device an essential for all organizations large and small. So when selecting a fax machine next time think of ‘Document Sender and Fax Receiver Appliances’ as an alternative solution.

Source by Klaus Bollmann