Compliance
Reducing fax-related compliance risks
Googling the term “email compliance” will find you 100.000 hits. This is not surprising: corporate governance requires organizations retain their records for a specific period of time, which by default includes emails. And we all know examples of companies that were unable to produce emails when requested to do so during a trial, and punished heavily for it.
Googling ”fax compliance” delivers far fewer results, even though a fax is as much a business record as an email message. However, ensuring compliant faxing has never been as difficult as ensuring email compliance. In the early days, the receptionist would keep a hardcopy fax log with details of incoming and outgoing messages, and later on, intelligent fax server software like Fenestrae Faxination Server or Fenestrae Communication Server would create logs and archives.
The recent upsurge in the use of multifunction peripherals or MFP’s, however, has reintroduced the fax compliance challenge. According to IDC, 16.3 million MFP’s were shipped in 1Q09 alone. Many of these are configured to allow users to send and receive faxes on them. If this is done via a direct connection to a fax line, companies will again have difficulty in tracking who has sent what to whom, whether those messages were actually received, etcetera. It’s strange therefore, that searching for “MFP compliance” gets you fewer than 25 results, and for the most part these aren’t even relevant.
The solution: Fenestrae Communication Server MFP Connector
Fortunately, FCS customers need not worry. Adding an MFP Connector to your FCS installation enables you to send fax messages from your MFPs via the Fenestrae Communication Server. Message notifications can be delivered back on the MFP or directly into the user’s mailbox. Incoming messages can be delivered (printed) to an MFP and/or delivered simultaneously to an inbox, public/shared folder or distribution list. Most importantly, the Connector provides a central archival repository for all sent and received messages – regardless of the point of origin.
The Fenestrae MFP Connector is used as an interface between one or many MFP devices and the Fenestrae Server – it will safely support installations with up to 500 MFP’s. A standard MFP Connector license allows you to connect up to 5 MFP’s; for more MFP’s additional licenses are needed. Multifunction devices from HP, Xerox, OCE and Ricoh are supported out of the box. However, the connector is extensible, allowing for similar devices from other manufacturers to be supported as well, using our generic MFP connector.
