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| A VirtualPBX.Com Tutorial - Managing Fax Mail |
| Send a Fax to an Extension as Fax Mail then Download It Anywhere |
The VirtualPBX fax features allow a company to advertise only one fax number (his regular VirtualPBX number) but have faxes come to many different fax machines.
The VirtualPBX can handle incoming faxes in four different ways:
- The company can bypass the VirtualPBX entirely and advertise a local number for its fax machine. With this approach a company cannot use a single fax number if he has employees with fax machines at different locations.
- An extension owner can tell customers to send any faxes to the company's main 800/888/877 number, and an incoming fax will be automatically routed to the operators extension. This is a special feature which makes it simple for a company's customer to fax to the company, but it has the disadvantage that the extension owner who is expecting the fax must tell the operator to route it to his extension. Alternately, the operator must download each received fax on the company fax machine, review it, and route the either the paper copy or forward the electronic copy to the intended recipient. VirtualPBX has two special features to make this job much easier for the operator (see the paragraphs at the end of this tutorial).
- An extension owner can explain to a customer how to send fax mail to his extension directly. In this case, he will be paged when the fax arrives, and he can download the fax when he desires no matter where he is; or he can set the Automatic Fax Transmission options (see the paragraphs at the end of this tutorial) to automatically download the fax to his default fax number.
- An extension owner can enter the sender's fax number in his extension's VirtualDID routing table. This then causes a fax which is sent to the company's 800/888/877 number to be routed to his extension's Fax Mail directly (overriding the automatic routing to the operator). This has exactly the same result as the method above where the customer uses the menus to transmit the fax to an extension; only the onus is not placed on the customer to operate the system correctly. This is because all a customer has to do is to go to his fax machine, insert the fax, dial the company's main business number, and press start as he is used to doing with other fax transmissions.
The third and fourth methods describe one of the most useful features of the VirtualPBX, i.e. the ability to send a fax directly to an extension. When this is done, the fax is stored on the system until it is downloaded to a fax machine and deleted by the extension owner (either manually or automatically using the Automatic Fax Transmission options described at the end of this tutorial). He can be anywhere, in his office, at home, at a hotel, on a customer's premises, or traveling on business anywhere in the world and get his faxes.
Attention CEOs, CFOs, COOs, or (for that matter) anyone: Do you occasionally receive faxes that you want to be absolutely confidential, from the accountant, from the law firm, from the bank, from a brokerage house, from another department inside of your company, etc? If you are in a large company of course you have your own personal fax machine, but your secretary sees them. If you are in a small company there may be a shared fax machine, and anyone can see them. And of course, there are still fairly large companies which have their fax located in the mail room and distribute the faxes by the company internal mail. Using the VirtualDID feature, you can store the phone numbers of the fax machines from any of the above sources in the VirtualDID routing table to always be sent to your extension's fax mail to guarantee absolute confidentially and to be available to you no matter where you are at the time.
When fax mail arrives for an extension owner, he is automatically paged with the call-back number:
The code, 002, at the end tells the extension owner that a fax has arrived for him as distinct from a voice message which has the code, 001. The pager acts as the "message light" and may either be a standard pager or a combination cell/phone pager. If one has a digital cell phone, it is not necessary to carry both a cell phone and a pager. Furthermore with many digital providers, it is not necessary to call the cell phone to leave a page; see the tutorial on new-message paging.
The fact that the fax is stored on the system is what gives the extension owner the ability to download his new fax at any machine where he happens to be at the time. Furthermore if the fax is confidential, he can stand over the fax machine while the fax is being downloaded thus guaranteeing that no one else sees it.
One of our customers sent us the following amusing story which illustrates the utility of the fax-mail feature:
They had an important document which had to be signed by four members of their company and returned to an attorney the next day. The company was a start-up, and the person collecting the signatures also worked at a second job during the day. He managed to get two of the signatures where he was, but the third and fourth persons were 50 and 500 miles away respectively. The situation, however, was even worse. The third person did not have a fax machine at his home, and the fourth party's fax machine was his computer. Thus while he could receive the fax, he could not sign it and return it that evening.
Using the fax-mail feature of the virtual PBX, however, the problem was easily solved. The third signatory also worked at a machine shop which had a fax machine, and he had to go in that evening to finish a special run of machined parts. The person collecting the signatures faxed the document with the signatures of the first two parties already affixed to the extension of the third person.
When the third person got to the machine shop, he went to the fax machine, downloaded his fax, signed it, and faxed it back to the extension of the first person. When the fax came back, the digital cell phone of the first party immediately alerted him that the fax was back with the third signature. He downloaded it and then faxed it to the fourth extension owner. (The extra downloading was only to check the document. It would have been possible to transfer the fax directly to the fourth person's extension without passing through the extra fax machine.)
The fourth signatory downloaded the fax into his computer and printed it on his laser writer. He then signed it and gave it to his wife. The next day she took it to work and faxed it to the first person's extension. In the mean time the first person was no longer in his office but at his second job. When the fax came to his extension that morning, he was immediately alerted by the pager feature of his cell phone.
He then went to the nearest fax machine, and downloaded the fax with all four signatures. At noon he took the faxed document with the four necessary signatures along with two other documents which needed original signatures to the lawyer's office easily meeting the tight deadline.
Using the Fax-Mail Feature
If a customer or other business relation calls that he wishes to send a fax to an extension owner, the extension owner explains the following instructions to him:
"Go to your fax machine and, using its hand set, dial our virtual PBX number. When it answers, follow the menu instructions as there is a menu item for sending faxes to an extension. My extension is xxx."
The menus are well written, and this is very easily to do. As a result, I have very little trouble with outside customers or callers being able to do this. People, however, are creatures of habit; and for those individuals who are used to going to a fax machine, placing the papers in the input, dialing the number, and pressing start without using the hand set; the virtual PBX has a special feature for them.
If someone merely dials the virtual PBX number of an extensions owner's company and presses start, the virtual-PBX system is programmed to listen for fax tones from incoming callers. If this happens, the virtual PBX stores the fax under the operators extension and the operator is paged. The operator can then deal with these faxes (see the paragraphs at the end).
While as explained above, it is easy for for a customer to send Fax Mail to an extension, it still has some drawbacks. The new 3-in-one fax machines usually do not come with a handset, and some businesses and individuals have removed the handsets from their fax machines. In addition, asking a customer to send a fax to an extension puts the onus on him to get it right. A better method is for the employee of the company using the VirtualPBX as its phone system to arrange for the fax to go to the right extension without the customer having to take any special steps beyond what he is already familiar with.
For these reasons the VirtualDID option includes the ability to enter a customer's fax number in the routing table so that any fax coming from that number will automatically go to the correct extension. When a customer indicates that he wishes to send a fax, the extension owner asks him for the fax telephone number of the machine from which the fax will be sent. The extension owner then asks the System Administrator to enter that number in the VirtualDID list for automatic routing to his extension.
Thus the system readily handles customers who wish to send faxes the same way that they have always done it; but if the extension owner can either get the sender to use the handset on the fax machine and send it to his extension or if he enters the customer's fax number in his VirtualDID routing table, things will go a little smoother and he (not the operator) will be paged when the fax comes it.
To download a fax from an extension's stored messages:
Dial the companies virtual PBX main number. When the system answers dial #[Extension]#[Password]#. At this point if one listens for a moment after dialing the above string, the system will announce whether any new voice- or fax-mail messages have been received. Also system administrators must press 1 to act as an extension owner on the system. A word of caution: until a message is either saved or deleted the system will continue to announce it as a new message whether it has been heard or downloaded or not. Thus after a fax message has been downloaded to a fax machine, it should always be saved or deleted.
Also at this point the menu tree depends on whether there are just faxes alone or whether both voice and fax mail is on the system.
If only fax mail is on the system, dial 11 after the last # (or for system administrators, the last #1). The system then plays envelope information, i.e. the unique fax ID number, when the fax was received, whether its source was inside or outside of the virtual PBX, and the number from which the fax was sent. After the envelope information has been played, the menu options are presented: 1, to rehear the envelope information; 2, to save the fax, 3; to delete the fax; 4, to send the fax to a fax machine for viewing; 5, forward to another extension which is what the operator would use if someone sent a fax directly to a company number rather than to an extension; 7, return to a previous fax; and 9, skip to the next fax.
It is not possible to continue dialing past the 11 without first listening to the envelope information. This is an exception to the general rule that a "power user" can simply dial a string all the way to a desired option without listening to the menus. The system was designed this way to keep someone from accidentally deleting an important message by making a mistake in dialing a long string in one gulp. If desired however, the envelope information can be skipped by pressing any key while it is playing.
If both voice and fax mail are on the system, the menus present the choice after the 11 of pressing 1 for voice mail or 2 for fax mail. This menu item is skipped if only one kind of mail is on the system.
Once the envelope information is finished and the menu options begin, pressing 4 selects the option of sending the fax to a fax machine. At this point it is possible to download the fax to the machine you are standing at (if you have called in using the handset on the machine), menu item 1; or to your default fax number (if you have defined one), menu item 2; or to a third-party fax machine whose number you know, menu item 3.
System administrators must first dial 1 after #[Extension]#[Password]# in order to act as an extension owner. At this point they dial the strings exactly as explained above.
Automatic Fax Transmission
If desired an extension can be configured to always download any fax to the default fax machine number. Furthermore, the automatic down loading can be chosen to place the fax in the new-message folder or in the deleted-message folder effectively deleting the fax from the system. There should be no fear, however, of losing a fax this way as faxes are kept in the deleted message folder for one week before being finally erased from the system. Thus a deleted fax can be recovered if necessary.Setting the Automatic Fax Transmission Options
To set the Automatic Fax Transmission options:
- Be sure that the correct fax-machine number has been stored in at least one of the default fax numbers. For information on entering contact phone numbers, see the tutorial Managing Extensions.
- Call into the VirtualPBX and dial #[Extension]#[Password]#227 or 1227 in the case of a system administrator. This gets to the Automatic Fax Transmission menu. There are three choices: 0 to disable Automatic Fax Transmission, 1 to automatically transmit faxes to the default fax contact number and place the fax in the new-message folder, and 2 to automatically transmit faxes to the default fax contact number and place the fax in the deleted-message folder.
The Fax ID Number
To facilitate managing several faxes without confusing them, each fax is given a unique fax ID number which is printed on the fax directly after the phone number from which the fax was received. The sending phone number and the fax ID number are delimited by a colon (:). Thus when listening to the envelope information and deciding whether to download a fax, forward it to another extension, etc, it is possible ot be sure that the correct fax is being processed.Operator Management of Incoming Faxes
The above two features, Automatic Fax Transmission and Fax ID numbers, make it especially easy for the operator to manage a large number of incoming company faxes. The operator sets his extension for Automatic Fax Transmission option 2, automatically transmit faxes to the default fax contact number and place the fax in the deleted-message folder.When a new fax comes in, the operator can note the intended recipient and the fax ID number. At this point the operator can transmit the paper copy to the recipient or electronically forward the fax to the correct extension and discard the paper copy. The advantage of electronic forwarding to an extension is that it is much faster than sending a paper copy through the company mail system. Faxes basically travel at the speed of light, and nothing is more frustrating than sending an important fax to a company and have it bog down in the company internal mail system and arrive two days after it was sent.
If employees, salesmen, representatives, etc. can convince their respondents to send faxes directly to their extension, all of the above difficulties can be avoided. This is especially important if the fax is confidential.
Often customers and other respondents have a very high "resistance-to-change" coefficient; and for these people, VirtualPBX.Com has set up the system so that faxes sent directly to the VirtualPBX number go directly to the operator's extension.
Two Final Points
Firstly, downloading or transferring a fax does not delete it unless the Automatic Fax Transmission options have been set to place the fax in the deleted message folder. Otherwise the fax may either be saved or deleted as desired, but this must be explicitly done to remove it from the system. If one happens to delete a fax which is later needed, don't despair. Deleted faxes are kept on the system for a further week and may be recovered at any time during that period.
Secondly, in the latest generation 3-in-one office machines (printers, copiers, and fax machines) some manufacturers have chosen to omit the hand set. If a customer has such a machine, faxes must either be routed automatically to the operator or the customer's fax number must be entered in the VirtualDID routing table in order to send the fax directly to an extension. In this case simply tell the customer to go to his "3-in-one" machine, dial the main virtual PBX number an press start.
Faxes can still be downloaded to these new machines, however, since the VirtualPBX has a menu option to download to a machine when calling from a different telephone.
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Date of First Publication: March 1999