Fax management
- Article 17 of 26
- M-iD, April 2005
Facsimilie machines are still in widespread use, and so long as they remain so, the documents they produce must be properly managed.
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Some devices, such as those from Xerox, Canon and Ricoh, are capable of integrating directly with fax servers, while presenting a standard fax interface to employees: all the employees have to do is feed in the fax and dial the destination number - the fax server then takes over.
Paul Birkett, Xerox Global Services' UK business solutions manager, says that such devices will often require user ID and passwords for security and accounting purposes, something that makes them highly applicable for compliance. Other devices can be configured to scan the fax as it is sent, so the image can be deposited in a records management system.
While outgoing faxing may therefore be almost trivial, incoming faxing remains significantly harder to manage for several reasons. A standard fax machine will typically be a departmental or company fax: all faxes for the department or the company arrive at the same machine. Often, however, organisations would prefer more intelligent routing with the right fax going directly to the right employee.
However, being able to determine who the right employee is from a flat, potentially low quality 200dpi black and white image (potentially only 20 kilobytes in size) of some handwritten text is a difficult, if not impossible task.
Fortunately, there are a number of ways to simplify the problem. Digital lines, such as ISDN, are able to support multiple fax numbers. As a result, companies that switch to digital lines can give employees individual fax numbers. The incoming fax server can then route the incoming faxes to the correct employee or workflow. However, making the switch to digital is often harder than it might seem.
“Sometimes there's a crossover between IT and telecoms,” says Peter Steggall, sales manager at Castelle AMS. “IT don't want it. Telecoms don't want to lose control. So sometimes there's friction there. It can be quite contentious, particularly if there's a third-party PBX supplier involved that offers something similar that the customer doesn't want.”
Organisations making the switch need to appoint someone who can supervise both IT and telecoms and get them to co-operate - particularly on the thorny subject of whose budget will pay for the work and accept the benefits. This particular argument can spread to other departments, since faxing and fax supplies will often be paid for by individual departments and their budgets.
Content management
Dealing with the content of the fax is the next stage. Handwriting recognition systems are not viable in such settings, so a better angle of attack is to get as many incoming faxes sent in on standard forms, rather than handwritten.
Until recently, Manchester City Council's public health inspectors used to provide handwritten faxes for notifying their department of closure notices. Secretaries would then have to input the information in the faxes manually, creating a two-week backlog on closures and increasing insurance liabilities.
Xerox's Birkett and his team redesigned the forms so that the necessary information could be provided through tick boxes. Different forms can be identified using barcodes (or unique 'glyphs' or ID numbers) and the system can then use that to recognise which zones of the fax contain the data for entering into databases using optical character and mark recognition.
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