Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Receiving digital faxes

There's always a lot of discussion on the boards about sending faxes digitally. Just wondering what users are doing when they receive faxes digitally rather than paper.

We both send and receive digital and paper faxes. Our system places the digital fax into an INBOX as a PDF file and we view it, then delete if junk or wrong fax--I am constantly getting another practices faxes--and print or import the ones we need. We are using a RICOH system, seems to work well for us--on the weekends all of the faxes are set to come in digitally and we go through the file on Monday AM.

Just wondering, because we are looking for Beta testers for those receiving faxes digitally. We have worked on it for quite awhile, and it's very functional.

Folks,
Question...Does anyone know the basics of how to set such things up in a peer to peer set up? We have the mother of all, inkjet all in ones, the HP 9120. It's twain and hardwired back to our router and so to our main server type computer. It seems that such a setup is simply a matter of knowing how and where to set such things up...thanks much.
Paul

Your fax machine has to have an ability to receive faxes directly to computer. For example, I have Brother MFC. It has "PC-Fax" option and comes with PC-FAX Receiving software. All you need to do is to follow the instructions to activate this option and select the folder to save the incoming faxes.
My fax machine has to be connected to the computer with a USB cable in order to receive faxes, not through the router.
The received faxes are saved as files on the computer connected to the fax with USB. You can get access to the received faxes via router/shared folder. My fax machine has 2 cables attached: one is ethernet cable connected to the router, so I can use network faxing, second is USB cable connected directly to the receptionist computer. Athough I don't receive faxes electronically anymore. I found it to be more time consuming for me than regular faxing. It takes less time for me to initial a report and give it to the nurse for scanning, than to add a comment to a PDF file and forward it to the nurse.

apricot-i use the brother mfc as well, but b/c it was already hooked up to the router (and didn't want to hook a usb/parallel to it too), i noticed that the modem in the comp i was using also was capable of fax, so i'm using that to digitally receive faxes (in .tiff format)...

what u can do, is if u have some relatively ok paint or pic editor program, u can easily just check mark the refill/etc boxes for med/service refills and send that fax out directly w/ ur brother program-making it all paperless. u can also import the faxes directly as well into ur chart, without having to rescan.

bert-what type of beta testing did u have in mind?

We would like to send the full software program to a few users of AC with full operability. It would have a limit of imports but very generous. We would like to see if it is useful and/or find any bugs. We were importing into the chart, but have found this way to be much faster and more accessible. Let me know.

hockeyref,

Not sure what setup you have or if you have domain vs peer to peer, althogh I think you said peer to peer. Also, are you connecting it directly to your router -- which should be fine. But, basically, you have two ways to go. It does appear that the 9100 is a network printer/fax/scan looking on the HP web site. So, you don't necessarily have to attach it directly to the router, although in effect you will: First, obviously, attach the phone line to your fax line. You can then attach an Ethernet cable to any Ethernet port obviously near your fax line. Now, you can install the fax/print drivers either from a CD or download from HP's site and any computer your install drivers on should be able to "see" the fax machine. The beauty of the networked fax machine is that you don't have to share the machine off another PC thus limiting your faxing or printing to the management of that PC (i.e. if it is off, you can't print/fax and the PC has to manage the spooling). Since it has fax forwarding capabilities, you can digitally receive all faxes instead of via paper giving you the advantages listed above.

Alternatively, if you have a server in a domain environment, you can install the driver one time on the server which will allow all of your PCs to use this print driver to send faxes via the server. This is a slightly better setup, because the server can then manage the faxes for you as far as spooling, etc.

Hope this helps.