Despite the tremendous attention given to the Internet, fax usage is still growing at a rate of 40 per cent, each year. In the US, one in six phone lines is a fax line and one-third of all US business calls are faxes. According to 'Desktop messaging: strategies for the corporate market', a market analysis by the British research center, Ovum, 15 per cent of secretarial time is used up by faxing. A study by Mercury Communications shows that conventional faxes cost $0.60 per fax. On the estimated annual volume of 75 billion pages a year, this represents staffing costs of over $21bn, for the US and Western European countries alone. By introducing fax servers for outgoing faxes, staffing costs can be reduced by 60 per cent.

Fenestrae realized that companies could save even more on fax distribution with a secure method to deliver faxes at the desktop while making the most of low telecommunications rates. The potential savings of fax-mail integration prompted the company to develop Fenestrae^® Faxination^® Server. This integrated fax server leverages the computer network and telecom investments enabling dramatic savings on fax communication.

Texaco Benelux saw the potential and implemented Fenestrae Faxination Server. Almost 1,000 corporate end-users have used the solution as part of their e-mail for more than a year. They rely on two fax-servers - one in Brussels and one in Rotterdam - and six telephone lines. The investment earned itself back within ten months. "The savings were immediately noticeable," says Lieven Van de Velde, telecom and LAN supervisor at Texaco Benelux.

Although the solution benefits are visible in the office, the actual costs are not. Usually fax budgets are badly managed - purchase and maintenance of fax machines are not accounted to IT budgets, but to less scrutinized office budgets. The costs are hidden as many companies don't differentiate between actual telephone and fax costs. But the need for more sophisticated technology has prompted the mood for change towards a more integrated approach.

Fenestrae Faxination Server leverages companies' existing e-mail systems. E-mail is a store and forward system that makes effective use of the available bandwidth on the network. Most LAN fax solutions are peer-to-peer-based, so that every client needs a session with the fax server. This requires a lot more bandwidth, especially in the interconnected bigger LANs. This additional bandwidth might be a one-off investment but the annual administrative overhead is not.

An e-mail system costs $290 per user, of which $245 is administrative overhead. Introducing a separate fax system at least doubles this amount, especially since the administration features in most fax packages are not as advanced as e-mail. Fenestrae Faxination Server uses the built-in directory of that e-mail system, so there is no overhead in maintaining a separate directory system for the fax application.

Some fax servers use error prone strings for fax addressing, such as 'GillBates@3,,6574343@fax'. Fenestrae Faxination Server uses the e-mail address book instead, with user-friendly templates that request the name, organization and number of the addressee. To the end-user, Fenestrae Faxination Server makes sending a fax as easy as sending any other electronic message. There is no separate interface or additional commands to learn.

At Texaco, Fenestrae Faxination Server is integrated with Microsoft Mail Server. The company wanted complete transparency for end-users. "E-mail destinations are listed in public and private address books, and can include any e-mail user, fax or telex-destination. The distribution list function of the e-mail systems enables users to send faxes to multiple destinations, with or without internal copies, and from any computer system, including Texaco's mainframes," says Lieven van de Velde.

Fenestrae Faxination Server enables a 60 per cent reduction on fax staffing costs, without doubling training and annual maintenance costs. Van de Velde continues: "At Texaco Benelux, there has been no need for user training. End-users simply make entries for fax destinations in their personal address books, and the rest is no different from sending a regular e-mail message." E-mail traffic is easier to control and communication-costs are better managed. Fax servers can also be set up to queue international faxes and send them at cheaper 'off peak' hours at extra low rates.

Users are also able to set up tables that tell the server when to fax the message. For instance a UK operator could include in the table that standard and low-priority messages to the US will be sent after office hours, while high priority messages will be faxed off straight away. This can save between 12-30 per cent on company phone bills without bothering the end user. International companies can redirect fax messages to a fax server closer to their destination and using a local rate. Half the corporate fax traffic is still intra-company. Once the fax system has become part of the e-mail system, it is very easy to silently migrate these messages to full-blown e-mail. These combined measures can shave up to 20-40 percent on the fax/phone bill.

Texaco Benelux has two Fenestrae Faxination Servers interconnected through the existing wide area network. "This has removed all international fax-traffic between the offices in Belgium and the Netherlands," says van de Velde. "Also, fax forwarding within the corporation has really become a file-transfer over the existing network, at no incremental cost."

Most fax servers concentrate on outgoing fax messages but even more money can be saved by automating inbound fax traffic. Traditionally, faxes are received on a central fax machine or printer and hand delivered to the addressee, a labor-intensive and slow approach that also introduces security risks. Quite often it might just take a few minutes to fax from one office to another but can sometimes take a full day or more to reach its final destination.

Prior to the Fenestrae Faxination Server implementation, Texaco's mail-room staff had to recognize destinations and hand-deliver more than 2,000 pages a week. The solution offers the perfect mechanism to deliver these messages to the end user. By receiving faxes on the Gateway, a dedicated operator can forward it by e-mail to the addressee. This also solves the problem of forwarding faxes to mobile employees. As soon as they dial into the corporate e-mail system, they receive their faxes as part of their e-mail routine.

While many proposals and standards for fax sub-addressing exist today, they all have the same problem: they are incompatible with the more than 40 million existing fax machines. ISDN offers the perfect solution for the present installed base. On an ISDN phone-line, it is possible to configure hundreds or even thousands of virtual phone numbers. When a call comes in, ISDN will signal which one of these numbers was dialed. In the Gateway directory, these numbers can be assigned to individual mailboxes. When the fax server answers the call, it reads the dialed number off the ISDN D-Channel, matches this with the directory and forwards the fax to the correct mailbox.

This method is fully transparent to senders. They do not need special equipment, ISDN-lines or add-on equipment, but use what they already have. To them, your new fax extension appears to be an ordinary fax number.

Now all Texaco Benelux employees have a virtual and personal fax number and receive incoming faxes directly as an electronic copy from anywhere at any time. Fax delivery is immediate, does not require any paper and is secure. Employees have their personal fax numbers listed on their business cards. The number of hand-delivered faxes has been reduced by more than 80 per cent.

ISDN is rapidly becoming widely available, especially in Europe, and is inexpensive. Euro-ISDN is available at rates competitive to analog lines. The annual surcharge for additional numbers on a line is about $0.15 per number, per month.

It's feasible to give every mailbox its own fax phone number. Received faxes are delivered fast and securely by the mail system, without any operator intervention. Some solutions require an administrative overhead to administer and publish these numbers on a per-user basis. This is where Fenestrae Faxination Server really stands out. It enables the mail systems directory to contain extra information, such as the user's direct fax number. When the system administrator adds a new mail user, they can enter their direct fax number along with the mail-ID, the room number, internal telephone number, department and job title. Fenestrae Faxination Server can put all this personalized information from the mail system directly on the coversheet. Fax system maintenance is fully embedded in the existing mail system and can even be done at the administrator's desktop anywhere on the network.

Savings in paper, reduced administration overhead, removal of existing fax equipment, and fewer international calls have returned the investment within 10 months. Less measurable benefits such as staffing, immediate delivery of incoming faxes, and ease of use for mobile staff, have contributed even more to the value of this system.

Fax automation offers tremendous cost savings and advantages over traditional fax. By selecting a true e-mail-based solution, the administrative, support and training costs are significantly reduced. Advanced features such as desktop delivery of faxes (direct inbound routing) can be implemented easily and will reduce staffing requirements and security threats. Throw in ISDN-based automatic inbound routing (or DID/DDI) and corporate faxing becomes what it already should be: a fast and cost-efficient way to communicate with customers and business partners.