Installation

$sudo aptitude install -P efax efax-gtk
$update-menus

Configuration

These are configuration for the Italian country. Edit the /etc/efax.rc file

and edit the following lines as following

DEV=modem (or your device without /dev/)
FROM="+39 02 123456" (own fax number)
NAME="Name and Surname"
PAGE=a4
TELCVT="sed -e s/+39// -e s/+/00/" (for Italy)
INIT="-iZ -iX3E&D2S7=120 -i&C0" (modem initialization string)
SPKR="-iM1L0"

Now try to send a fax

$echo "fax try" > fax.txt
$fax send -v $FAX_NUMBER fax.txt

efax-gtk configuration

For this application I preferred to set some paramters in the /etc/efax-gtkrc file and the each user can custom the behaviours via the graphical interface.

Edit the /etc/efax-gtkrc file and use these lines

NAME: Name and Surname (I've used the computer name)
NUMBER: +39 02 1234 5678 (fax number)
DEVICE: modem
PAGE: a4
INIT: Z X3E&D2S7=120 &C0 M1L0

Once the parameters are setted it should be possible to send fax with the graphical interface. Just select the file to send (only accept postscript file), input the phone number and use the send fax button.

If you need to customize your settings, you can do it with the File->Settings menu.

It's possible to get off the switchboard. If for example the "key to exit" is 0, and the number to dial is 02123456 then the number to pass to efax will be 0,02123456.

More informations are availble (italian) on the appunti and it.tldp

In fact, home based businesses are a $427 billion dollar industry. The average home based business brings in $63,000 a year. According to IDC, a top national research firm, there are between 34 million and 36 million home office households.

Now is a better time than ever to work from home. Turn the spare bedroom or even the den into a home office. It makes sense to cut cost and walk to the walk to work

There are currently dozens of service providers in this industry ranging from five-employee shops to Fortune 500 leaders. Some of these service providers include MyFax, RingCentral and TrustFax. J2 Global Communications is a Fortune 500 company that controls several internet fax service sites, such as Rapid Fax and Fax.com, but their most well known brand is eFax. confronted with a wide selection of service providers, fax senders may find the process of choosing a provider to be an unwanted stress to their business.

The recent lack of detailed information regarding internet fax services prompted Zilker Ventures, LLC to create FaxCompare.com. After much uninformative searching, Leo Welder, founder and COO of Zilker Ventures, LLC, signed up for an online fax service that he later had to cancel because it was lacking some features that were crucial for Zilker Ventures, LLC. This experience convinced Leo that the online fax service market was a prime space for an unbiased review site.

Further confirming the desire for helpful comparison and reviews was the discovery that eFax, the industry’s most well known leader, charges 70% more than the ‘Market Standard’ and provides fewer pages than their top competitors.

‘Market Standard’ for an internet fax service according to FaxCompare.com is $10 per month for 300 pages with no start up fee, a 30 day free trial and overage pages for $0.10 per page or less. At those rates, six months of service fees will cost substantially less than most traditional fax machines.

In addition to its ‘Market Standard,’ FaxCompare.com offers comprehensive eFax reviews and other eFax comparison details, including ‘need to know’ comparison figures regarding eFax service fees. As almost all of the advertising for these services is done on the web, most of the specifics regarding online fax services is listed by the providers themselves.

Online faxing will certainly benefit businesses in the future. And by discovering more about this contemporary business tool fax senders can maximize benefits and minimize cost. As founder Leo Welder puts it: “With great options like MyFax and RingCentral, unwitting consumers paying above market service fees is clearly the result of a lack of information. We hope to provide that information with FaxCompare.com.”

For additional information regarding online fax services, visit www.FaxCompare.com.

Zilker Ventures, LLC is a web publisher that consolidates information and reviews various business and financial products.

Contact:

Jen Udan
Zilker Ventures, LLC
pr@zilkerventures.com
http://www.zilkerventures.com

Jillian, yes I do know some things you can do and I am glad that you asked this question because I was just going through this same situation all weekend. I have 2 great stories to tell you which should summarize the answer for you. First let me tell you about my weekend and what I discovered. I spent my weekend designing (yes, I worked on several projects!) but something hit me Friday night and I asked myself "How am I tracking these things, my contacts, my leads, my work flow, what am I doing?!?!" and I felt at that moment that my business was in chaos so I had to make a change.

I googled "contact management applications" and came up with a couple great programs I could use. For you, it would be a program like Top Producer and I think if they made a program like TP but for what I do, I would be in heaven but there isn't anything out there that does that exactly so I had to sign up for a couple different programs in order to get everything I needed and after trying to set everything up and go through I realized just how stupid I was being. I have a great program already, it's called Microsoft Outlook!

HELLO! Jillian, you can use what you have. You don't have to purchase things just because it seems you need it. You need what it gives you yes, but you can always come up with a better solution. For me, I went into my contacts in Outlook and organized everything by category and "filed as" and BOOM, I had exactly what I was looking for. Pair that with Quickbooks and I don't need anything else.

So about a year ago I purchased efax plus which is great because people can fax you and it goes straight to your mailbox. How cool is that? Well over the last year, I've used it maybe 5 times. Honestly, you scan something to fax it right? Well most fax machines will scan to pdf and then e-mail it if you choose that option so what's the point of an actual efax? I purchased the efax thinking that the concept would make people feel I am more established but honestly, I just wasted $483.95.

USE WHAT YOU HAVE! Don't make things more complicated than they need to be. Stop the bleeding where ever you can. If it's not of actual dollar value to you, don't use it. But most importantly, don't look at what the realtor in the big office down the hall is doing because whatever works for that professional may not work for you. He may need efax plus but that doesn't mean you do. Thanks for sharing Jillian!

Cependant il peut arriver que vous ayiez besoin d'en envoyer ou d'en recevoir un de manière ponctuelle pour vos échanges avec certaines administrations, assurances ou banques car le fax a plus de valeur juridique qu'un email. Au lieu d'acheter un appareil qui vous servira moins d'une fois par an pourquoi ne pas utiliser un service d'envoi et/ou de reception de fax par internet ?

- Si vous êtes abonnés Free

le fournisseur d'accès vous a attribué un numéro de fax gratuit !  Pour cela, un numéro supplémentaire, dedié à cet usage est attribué : par exemple, si votre numéro de téléphonie Freebox est le 09 51 23 45 67, vous pourrez recevoir vox fax sur le 09 56 23 45 67 (il suffit d'incrémenter le 4° chiffre du numéro de 5 unités). Communiquez à vos correspondants ce numéro et vous recevrez le fax dans votre boite email de contact.

Du coté de l'envoi là aussi Free vous a gaté puisque l'envoi de fax est facturé le même prix qu'une communication téléphonique : c'est à dire que l'envoi de fax est gratuit vers la France et plus d'une cinquantaine de pays. Pour envoyer un fax il vous faudra préalablement convertir les documents à envoyer au format PDF et passer par votre espace client sur le site de Free.  Certains freenautes ont même développés des logiciels pour vous faciliter la vie en proposant de convertir vos fichiers en pdf et en les envoyant ensuite par fax. Vous trouverez sur les sites UniversFreebox ou Freenews des tutoriels plus complets.

- Si vous n'êtes pas abonnés Free :

 il faut bien l'avouer vous ne trouverez pas de site pouvant concurrencer free en terme de simplicité du service ou de la tarification. A noter toutefois qu'Alice propose ce service depuis plusieurs années mais avec l'envoi de fax payants sur son site http://fax.aliceadsl.fr

Services de reception de fax par mail :

Certains services comme Efax vous permettent de dispser d'un numéro de fax surtaxé (de type 0826... ) gratuitement. Les faxs reçus à ce numéro seront alors transférés vers votre boite mail. Si vous souhaitez envoyer des faxs ou un numéro de téléphone géographique il faudra vous tourner vers les offres pro d'efax.

L'opérateur Ippi.fr vous propose un numéro de fax géographique de type 01,02,03,04... Les faxs sont transférés dans votre boite mail et consultables sur le site ippi.  L'offre Fax2Mail est proposée gratuitement pour les particuliers avec insertion de plusieurs pages publicitaires et avec un minimum de réception de 5 fax par mois afin de conserver sa ligne de fax.

Le site Monfax.com vous propose de son coté le service le moins cher : activation immédiate et choix de votre numéro de fax. Pas de minimum de reception mensuelle ou de numéro de fax surtaxé pour vos correspondants. Vous recevez vos faxs sur la ou les adresses emails de votre choix.

Envoi de fax par internet :

Le site Faxgratuit.net vous permet d'envoyer un fax par l'intermédiaire de leur site. Vous devez indiquer votre adresse email pour recevoir un code. Ce code est vous permet d'envoyer 4 fax par jour. Un formulaire assez basique vous demande le numéro de fax du destinataire, l'objet du message et le texte du message. Pas de possibilité d ajouter une pièce jointe à votre fax. Le message envoyé comportera de la publcité avant et après votre message.

At my company, NexGen, SaaS’s biggest Asia Pacific cheerleader, we have always endeavoured to ‘eat our own dog food’, and run an ASE. We succeed - almost.

As a start-up our requirements were clear.  We needed solutions that were quick to rollout, easily managed; offered flexible access, low upfront costs, and the ability to scale with our growth.  Software as a Service solutions offered each of these.  We deliberately went out to be as realistic as posible, building up our platform as if we were a normal non SaaS aligned start-up and based only on our internal requirements.  We did this to better understand the end customer and the industry.

The first step was finding suitable applications.  Part of our vision at NexGen is to evangelise Software as a Service in and for the Asia Pacific region so we are in a good position to know the offerings available but for someone outside of the industry it is still too much of an effort to find and test all the applications we required.  The SaaS community, including NexGen in the Asia Pacific region and the new channels that are emerging hope to improve this soon.  We utilised sources like Tanooma, SaaS Showplace, IBM’s SaaSpace and Neobinaries

We built our infrastructure carefully starting with the essentials, Office Productivity (MS Office), Networking (Linked In ), EmailSales Management (SalesForce), Document Management (Local storage), Telephony (desk Mobiles/Cells), Faxing (a fax machine), and basic website hosting (local web host).
Then in came the manual replacements - advanced Telephony (Alianza), advanced Banking (upgraded banking service), Fax Management (efax ); and more functionality advanced Document Management (Xythos On Demand), advanced web hosting, advanced Email and Calendaring (Hosted Exchange), Blog + Wiki (Hosted SharePoint) and Web Meetings (GoToMeeting ).
Finally we implemented Systems Management (TriActive ), Email Marketing (iContact), collaborative office productivity (Google Apps & Buzzword – see my article SaaS in the Office ), and mind mapping (bubbl.us).
Still to come are Business Intelligence (Enovation – see SaaS Business Intelligence), Billing (Aria ), advanced Business Networking (Xeequa ), and a Knowledge Base (Hosted SharePoint).  To give a simple user experience all applications are brought together in our Intranet (Hosted SharePoint). (local web host),

Is Internet access a problem? No, there is MORE access than the in-office alternative. I have access to our SaaS platform in our offices, as well as hotels, airports, and cafes, and I don’t require a VPN nor suffer from the slower access you normally experience with one.  It will get even easier with the rollout of services like WiMAX in Asia and the Pacific .

 What about support?  Believe it or not but we have LESS user incidents on our All SaaS platform than on an equivalent internal platform, due mainly to the focus on usable user interfaces and on applications doing one thing and doing it well.  Of the incidents we have had, most of the problems have been able to be solved very simply by either internal technical team members or even by the user themselves, mainly because of a high availability and relevance of self support options such as FAQ’s, training video’s, online manuals and built in hints and tips.  The main area of inconvenience has been in the few incidents that have required support by the vendor.  Though we have found SaaS support to be generally of a high standard, multiple vendors mean multiple support teams rather than one internal IT team, absence of advice in the context of our company, and a slower pace to action.   This suggests that there is space in the SaaS Ecosystem for outsourcers, MSP’s and aggregators to pull together multiple offerings and provide company contextual support and advice.

Is there a SaaS solution for everything?  We found suitable solutions for everything except Accounting and offline office productivity .  Being based in Singapore brings many advantages but it also brings specific accounting rules and a small market that has not yet been reached by a product focussed at small businesses – hopefully soon.
Also desktop based Office Productivity and email/calendaring are required when offline, however the offline web via Firefox 3, Adobe AIR, and Google gears will soon fill this gap (refer to my article "SaaS in the Office – Web based Office Productivity ”)

What is the overall experience? We have been running most of our All SaaS platform for the better part of a year and our experience has been almost unanimously good.  Of most importance to our business is that we have more functions available more often, and kept to a higher standard of availability than if we had in-sourced our infrastructure.  Our COO is effectively our entire IT department, but we still have hundreds of on-call systems experts to help us.  And most importantly of all, process implementation and change is more business driven, not technology driven.  See a full list of benefits in the accompanying All SaaS Enterprise (ASE) - the Applications and Analysis article.

 What would I do differently next time?  We are very happy with our infrastructure but if ‘next time’ the Web based Office Productivity area is solved, and there are Software as a Service Aggregators who can provide support in the context of our company, then we would take advantage of these.

See a full list of the SaaS offerings, benefits, hassles, worries see the accompanying All SaaS Enterprise (ASE) - the Applications and Analysis.

* I also post versions of relevant AsiaPacific articles from this this blog on the SaaS Asia Pacific Community site.

SaaS offerings 

We chose applications based on our requirements, not SaaS ideology.  The decisions we made are by category of application are :

Accounting – QuickBooks

Try as we might we have not yet found a suitable SaaS accounting solution that suits our company – a Singapore based start-up with a QuickBooks experienced accounting team - Quickbooks have a SaaS application but it is only availabale for the US.  There are many good solutions out there, including some Asia Pacific SaaS solutions (SaaSu , Xero , and myworkspace), just none right for our situation.

Banking – CitiBank

Our executive team uses our banks SaaS account management application which utilises a dongle to create, approve and enquire on transactions amongst other things.  One of the best examples of SaaS, it is easy to use and enormously valuable in that it enables even the most mobile executive to keep financial control all over the world at any time of the day.

Billing – Aria
Aria provides full customer billing lifecycle management.

Blog – Wordpress , and managed Sharepoint
Both offerings provide a good quality blog as part of wider function sets.

Business Performance management / Business Intelligence – Enovation
Enovation provides an excellent easy to use and quick to value SaaS BPM offering.

Document Management – Xythos On Demand, Local storage, and Local Backup
Xythos provides a full document management solution, including online storage and access control, version control etc.  We utilise the solution only to half of its full extent but it still one of the most valuable for our very mobile organisation.  It ha a web absed file amanger interface but also require a local client for synchronisation of files onto a PC.

Email and Calendaring - Hosted Microsoft Exchange
We looked at Zimbra, Google apps and other solutions but a Hosted Exchange solution won for three reasons – it had the breadth of functionality we required, our users were comfortable and experienced in using it, and we could not find suitable Zimbra hosters in region.  This is an area we will continue to review as there are many exciting things happening here.

Email Marketing – iContact
Email marketing is an important function for us to keep in touch with our networks.  iContact does the job cleanly and well with an easy to use interface. We also looked at ConstantContact which was also a good quality product.

Fax Management - efax & physical fax machines
Despite the prevalence of email, faxes are still an important communication method.  With a mobile workforce a single location specific solution was not tenable for quick communication.  E-Fax allows us to receive and send faxes as if we were in the office when we are anywhere in the world.  We still have physical fax  machines but these are rarely used.

Intranet – Hosted Microsoft SharePoint
Sharepoint is not without its issues but it is still a good intranet solution.  The hosted model and it’s availability in combination with hosted exchange made this the best intranet choice for our business.

Mind Mapping - bubbl.us
Mind Mapping is an excellent tool – I encourage everyone to add it to their office communications practices.  It is not as fully featured as some of its on computer rivals but it is good enough and makes sharing and collaborating on mind maps extremely easy.

Networking - Xeequa & Linked-in
Networking is an essential function for a SaaS hub like NexGen.  Linked-In is a staple personal networking and relationship management solution.  Xeequa is for both individuals and their companies.  It adds company to company relationships and some advanced ways to interact.

Office Productivity – MS Office (locally installed), Google Apps , Wiki, Buzzword
Unfortunately I can’t say we are all SaaS here.  We use a mixture of solutions to match the requirement of the situation.  For one internal project we use only Google Apps, we communicate collaborative group information via a wiki, and we use Buzzword where it makes sense, but the main product of use is MS office.  This is mainly because this way of working is accepted by our staff and always accessible.  There are however many areas in Office productivity that SaaS can improve on – see my SaaS Office Productivity article for my thoughts here.

Sales Management – SalesForce
Being a SaaS hub keeping track of our relationships and opportunities is core to our business so this was one of the most important pieces of our infrastructure solution.  We also looked at entellium and hosted Suger CRM.

Systems Management – TriActive
A mobile workforce means, until our SaaS infrastructure is completely clientless, mobile computers and the requirement to manage them.  With some Systems Management experience of my own I really appreciate the value a SaaS model brings to this area.  Systems Management was formally a heavy lifting area with full time staff needed to install and maintain a local system.  With TriActive you get all the functionality you need with none of this hassle.

Unified Communications / Telephony – Alianza
Our team is very mobile in both the Asia Pacific region and in the U.S. which can mean expensive phone bills.  It also means that they could be hard to get hold of.  When I first heard of VoIP as a SaaS product it took me a while to appreciate that business telephony does not have to be a special case and can be viewed as another business system like the rest of our platform.  Amongst many other benefits, our SaaS based VoIP and IP-PBX solution from Alianza means that we have the same number wherever we are via either deskphone or softphone, and that our team can all change their call forwarding via an easy web interface

Web Meetings – GoToMeeting
Web meetings save us an enormous amount of time and money and can also be our partners preference in many situations.  This is an essential piece of infrastructure and GoToMeeting is the one we rate to be the most intuitive solution by a good margin.

Website – Externally Hosted
This is a no brainer but it is important to note that it is still SaaS in a broad sense, and one of the earliest forms.  You could host your website internally if you wanted to but unless there are some big reasons to do that why would you?

Wiki – Xythos , Hosted Microsoft SharePoint
Both offerings provide a good quality blog as part of wider function sets.

Benefits, Hassles and still to be decided

From our experience we have been able to compile a list of benefits of our All SaaS platform, they are :

• Interface is business focussed, not geek focussed - easy setup
• Up and running straight away
• Supports and enables an independent workforce
• Lower costs
• Less hassle
• Less downtime
• More uptime – best quality backups for quicker recovery (we have not lost one byte of data yet)
• More access (when in the office, travelling with laptop and using a foreign device)
• Running better apps than we could by ourselves (some examples are systems management, business intelligence, location independent VoIP, billing)
• Enormous upfront cost reduction
• Change is a business decision, not a technology decision
• No sleepless nights worrying about backup and stability
• New features with no upgrade pain
• Consistent cost - our systems are listed under business infrastructure on our P&L
• We know the cost of doing business every month right in front of me
• Single access point for all applications in security enabled internet accessible intranet
• Also gives independent end users control - SaaS apps are generally accessible and usable
• No application conflict worries

We also have been able to put together a list of hassles

• Dealing with many different vendors rather than one it team
• Support
  • Though mostly good, is unable to advise in the context of our company
  • For one product in particular remote support has been an issue, as opposed to having internal it dept.  For other apps it has been fine to have email alone.
  • Support is slower Finding suitable SaaS solutions for our business

And what else should be considered for your organisation :

• Internal technical resources bring product knowledge with them
• Options to suit all organisation types (i.e. we couldn’t get an adequate accounting package for a Singapore small business)
• SaaS doesn’t solve everything – solution introduction still requires co-ordination, but for user experience, not installation
• The effect of other support & training Mechanisms - On line scalable customer care - FAQ's, Discussion boards, online support desk, pre recorded video's, built-in helpdesks.
• How does the offering facilitate switching providers?
• Am I choosing the best product?

Are any services are deviceclient dependent?

Two applications (Offline Office Productivity, and Accounting) require local installs. Six applications require a local client installed on the users device for full functionality.  Only one is very specific device dependant (Unified Communications).

 The options available to run an All SaaS Enterprise are both varied and rich but there are some small holes in our ability to find the right business software solutions for every requirement.  There is a long list of benefits that far outweigh the hassles.  Though there are still some questions to be answered the SaaS industry is hard at work on them.  Best of all we have found both an excellent solution for our business, and all the better that it is SaaS.

Also have a look at another companies All SaaS Enterprise enterprise experience.

* I also post versions of relevant AsiaPacific articles from this this blog on the SaaS Asia Pacific Community site.

With LOOP, you can upload all of your documents required for the fax, select specific pages, organize the final page order and then package everything to a single PDF . . . problem solved. No more headaches or wasted time printing and sending multiple files to your fax service.

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The email to fax option ensures that faxes sent to multiple machines arrive easily and quickly. Text, graphics and spreadsheets can be included from most applications, such as Word, Excel, or Outlook. Web-based email clients like Yahoo and Hotmail are also compatible with Send2Fax, and you can simply type in the fax number followed by fax.send2fax.com. Searching and retrieving a fax online is also easy with the document storage option. The service also integrates within Microsoft Outlook a simple script which allows you to personalize and broadcast faxes using each recipient’s name. However, the service does not provide members the possibility to select a vanity fax number or add signatures to faxes.

Send2Fax offers three pricing plans which match the needs of individual and small business, executive and corporate members. Each of the three plans include a personal fax number, Fax2Email, Email2Fax and Web2Fax options, and Office 2003 integrated install script. The lowest pricing plan, Send2Fax Individual/Small Business, includes 200 sent or received pages within the United States and Canada for a setup fee and monthly fee of $11.95 each. The Send2Fax Executive pricing plan offers 500 inbound and/or outbound pages within the US and Canada for $39.95 a month a $39.95 setup fee. At the same time, Send2Fax Corporate plan increases to 1000 pages per month to US and Canada for $79.95 per month and the same amount as a one-time setup fee.

For any of these three plans, each additional page can be sent or received at a $0.12 charge. Faxes stored within the Send2Fax online interface are charged $0.01 each/per month. International rates can be consulted on the company’s website. Customer support is available only through the online interface via email. However, Send2Fax provides several comprehensive instructions sets and an extensive FAQ section.

Today we're reviewing the most popular Electronic fax service called E-Fax (efax.com).

Signed up for the free service. I didn't really need to send faxes, so free service was fine for me. Works pretty good. I like the way the free software they offer works. Incoming faxes tell you how many pages you have received.

Heres the big thing....If you're not sending out a TON of faxes and you would like a dedicated fax line for free. THIS is the way to go. Simply sign up for the free service and never upgrade.

Here is a great way to make your small home based business, have a bigger corporate image. Get The Free Fax Number with an out of area #, and put "Corporate Headquarters Fax" & then that #, on all of your submissions. Works every time..:)

Overall, this has been a good service. I think their Efax plus rates are high at $12.95 US per month. I know that rapidfax is a little less, with unlimited sending of faxes, along with a number of other fax services.  However, the key here is that with efax you are getting a free fax service over the internet that will send directly to your email.  So, for the Free Fax Service of Efax I would DEFINITELY GIVE IT GO.   You really have nothing to lose but the minute you spent reading this blog posting..:)

I give Efax 2 Big Thumbs Up

[ How Can You Complain About FREE..:) ]