That is a very good synopsis of the issue. And, I agree FaxTalk is a very good fax server program.
But, there are still some statements that aren't completely correct, which I addressed in my above post. I think it is fair for Khaled to be well informed on this. Again, I think part of the reason this gets confusing is because of a lot of people talking about Brother machines (good machines) and Paperport. (which is good document managing software.
First, as Jon points out, Files CAN be faxed directly from your computer, e.g. from within AC, a Word document, whatever. They do not have to be converted to a pdf, found, and then faxed. The file will be converted to analog by your fax server and modem and then will be converted back to digital format at the other side. It is up to the recipient to decide if they want TIFF, PDF, PCX or whatever.
MFP can convert files directly to PDFs. In fact, most do. Most MFPs will allow you to set the file out put, and generally these will be TIFF or PDF. They do not have to be sent to the computer and then converted into PDFs by any 3rd party PDF program or Adobe or Paperport. If the fax machine is not capable of printing to a PDF, then you will need to convert it.
Faxes can be saved on MFP hard drives. Some of these hard drives are over 200GB and provide many functions that would not be available if they were only sent to a networked folder. Many of these MFPs that can save to their own hard drives have extremely sophisticated software which can tag, do OCR seamlessly, annotate, markup, and a million other things.
Grenville's MFP (Samsung) is Fax to PC capable and able to fax to PDF.
Khaled,
Basically, you should be looking for a fax machine, likely within a Multifunction Printer, which contains a fax server. In the specs you will see that it allows walk up fax, fax to PC, PC to fax, etc. You will want to know if it can use PDF as a file. Another VERY important thing is like SnappyFax and FaxTalk, any MFP that offers PC to Fax will have software on the clients providing a fax driver and a Graphical User Interface to help with faxing. This means when you bring up the document to fax and select the print/fax driver, the fax software will come up and usually include an address book and certain settings such as the ability have the fax sent at a later date. Many times this software will connect to some central application that will allow you to track your inbound and outbound faxes.
The reason why this is important is you could go out and purchase a $10,000 fax machine with all of the above and then find out that the user interface for PC to Fax is horrible.
@Jon...Does you fax machine not have the ability to fax physically from it? I mean by that can you walk up to the machine and simply fax a document somewhere?
