Advances in technology like the desktop computer and the internet have made what were once mundane office and home tasks much simpler to do while at the same time increasing the speed and efficiency with which we can do them. One device that has fallen out of favor as a result is the fax machine. Faxing software enables one to send a document from a personal computer by making use of the internet. Today's fax software is tailored to work with a graphical user interface such as Windows thus ensuring that anyone who knows how to use a computer can use it. There are many benefits of using a fax program.
The first has to do with cost. Faxing software is much cheaper than traditional faxing. You no longer need to have an extra phone line or buy a fax machine just for sending or receiving faxes. Additional avenues of saving come in the form of using the very same infrastructure for connecting to the internet to send faxes. In fact, sometimes the actual cost of sending the fax is free. In addition, even if a dial up internet connection is used, the documents to be faxed can be queued on the fax server and sent in batches in order to reduce the overall cost.
Many forms of faxing software allow one to send faxes directly from the application used to create the document. Other than the convenience this provides in that one does not need to walk to the fax machine, it also means that the transmitted document has a higher level of clarity than a document sent using a fax machine.
Another advantage of fax software is the resilience of the process. Whereas an error in the faxing process when using a facsimile machine or damage to the faxed document would require the document to be re-faxed thus incurring an additional cost, this problem is eliminated when using faxing software. This is because since the document is sent in digital form and often also received in digital form, the electronic copy remains on the recipient's computer even after printing. Therefore, a need for an additional copy is met by simply printing the document again.
Fax software also brings more control in an organizational setting. The fax server can be used to not only apportion quotas for each user in the number of faxes they can send, it also serves as an audit trail in the process. It is possible for each document faxed to be traced end to end, from the user and computer that sent it to its destination. Compare this with a facsimile machine where it would be difficult to tell who sent a document since all that may be required to use it is physical access.
Still on control, given that transmission is entirely digital, control against junk fax messages is easier to achieve since all that one needs to do is blacklist the offending IP addresses.