As we progressed through the process of replacing our POTS lines with VoIP for the home office, we ran into a couple of issues that needed to be researched. One important one was the issue of how to send and receive faxes.
Several people who I’ve talked to about the trade-offs of using a single number for voice and fax versus a dedicated fax number have said that the key issue is that people using a single number are perceived to be hobbyists rather than serious business people. Also some businesses are more fax-centric than others. A good example of this is the medical field.
Kathleen needs to be able to send and receive faxes from insurance providers since most of them establish relationships with doctors on an individual rather than a per-practice basis. The effort she has undertaken to get listed as a health care provider with all of the major medical insurers that serve customers in the Pennsylvania suburbs of Philadelphia has required lots of faxing.
Many VoIP services include some fax capability. Speakeasy VoIP/Home provides the ability to receive faxes as email attachments. However, faxes must be sent to the same number that you use for voice calls, otherwise you have to buy another line at $23.95 per month. This is slightly different from how providers like Vonage handle fax, but the charges and performance of the VoIP service aren’t entirely comparable either.
What I chose to do was to get a eFaxPlus account and use that as my fax solution. This gives me a separate, dedicated fax number in my area code for $12.95 per month plus $0.10 per outgoing page and provides many of the same email-integration features I would get from using my Speakeasy VoIP/Home number for both fax and voice. The big difference is that I’m saving $11.00 per month in service fees, which means I’d need to send more than 110 pages of faxes per month in order to lose money on the deal.
Once I made the fax service decision, I focused on the right device to use to scan papers for faxing. I don’t want to use my Xerox WorkCentre 385 if it isn’t connected to a phone line in the traditional manner. The scanning capability it has isn’t very good and it also uses too much power when I use the laser printing engine in it to copy or print documents.
I’d prefer an inexpensive, compact scanner that is portable enough to use with my laptop if necessary. The one I chose is the Canon CanoScan LiDE 500F Color Image Scanner. I got the idea to purchase this from Googling around. Jeremy Zawodny’s article I Like My Canon CanoScan LiDE 500F Scanner made a good case for it.
The price is definitely right. I like the fact that it gets its power entirely from the USB 2.0 connector. This means I can hook it up to my Blogging Workstation most of the time. The scanner itself is no bigger than a laptop when laid flat on the desk, so it won’t take up as much room as typical flatbed scanners. I can also set it up so it sits on the desk in an upright position [ see photo on that page ], which makes it look like a partially-opened book.
At about $120, purchasing the CanoScan LiDE 500F eats into my expected savings, but I feel that its additional features make the expenditure worth it at this time. I can use it to scan documents for faxing, but it will also come in handy for scanning pages from magazines for digital storage or photos for which I can’t find the negative.
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