“We may not have been able to justify bringing a fully redundant fax server solution in house, but with Biscom’s hosted fax service we have the redundancy we need to keep our business going strong!”
- Chris Gregory, Operations Manager, United Directories

The Problem
Fax is an essential part of United Directories business process. However, their existing 10-port fax server system was not always 100% reliable. “We had constant problems and really weren’t pleased with our solution,” said Chris Gregory, Operations Manager at United Directories. “Sometimes our inbound ports would lock up and the server simply wouldn’t answer. They system dropped calls periodically and sometimes all of our lines would go down.” With the volume of faxes United Directories handles on a daily basis, even temporary outages can have a big impact.

As well, United Directories was experiencing difficulties with their local telephony service providers. Not only was it difficult to procure a reliable fax line, but some of the providers switched all traffic through voice-over-IP (VoIP) lines which caused problems with fax traffic. At one point United Directories saw a 10% drop in fax traffic – something that can be directly related to their bottom line. “When both your fax server and your provider are messing up, that’s just too many points of failure,” said Mr. Gregory. “We ended up looking for a hosted solution that could provide the reliability we needed.”

The Solution
FAXCOM Anywhere turned out to be the perfect solution for United Directories. A hosted version of Biscom’s award-winning FAXCOM solution, FAXCOM Anywhere, provides a simple desktop faxing solution that lets users send and receive faxes from their email systems. The sender simply composes an email, adds any documents that are required and addresses it to the customer’s fax number. Biscom’s fax hosted service receives the email, handles all aspects of the fax transmission (retries, interrupts, etc.) and sends a fax status report right back to the originator. Received faxes are even simpler: each user has a personalized fax number (local or toll-free) and receives faxes sent to that number as emails with a searchable PDF attachment containing the faxed document.

“...Biscom listened to our problems and came up with a tailor-made solution that met our needs.”

Regardless of local conditions for the customer, Biscom’s hosted fax service is always available to send and receive faxes and inbound transmissions never receive a busy signal. The result for Biscom customers is a fully redundant fax server solution without any investment in hardware, software or fixed lines. This proved to be just what United Directories was looking for. “We’re not big enough to be able to afford a fully redundant fax server solution in house,” said Mr. Gregory, “but we are big enough to need that redundancy to keep our business going!”

Implementing the FAXCOM Anywhere solution was simple and it immediately had noticeable benefits. “We saw an immediate uptick in our inbound fax traffic,” said Mr. Gregory. “Now, those statistics don’t fluctuate very much, so the improvement is really significant.” The benefits of a hosted solution were even more apparent when United Directories suffered a power outage a few weeks after installation. “Our entire region lost power and our local network died,” said Mr. Gregory. “Under our old system our customers would have received a busy signal and we would have lost business. But with FAXCOM Anywhere we’ve essentially insulated our last mile and FAXCOM Anywhere became our backup system. Their servers received all the incoming faxes and fed them to our systems once the power was back up. As far as our customers were concerned, we weren’t down at all! This was an unavoidable problem and we didn’t lose a thing – that’s a big win for us.”

United Directories has also seen clear benefits with regards to outbound faxing. Their previous system had some support for desktop faxing, but it was cumbersome to set up for individual users and difficult to customize. Many United Directories employees had given up on it and were using legacy fax machines for their outbound traffic. Now every user can send and receive faxes without having to leave their seats “Email to FAXCOM Anywhere is as simple as it gets” said Mr. Gregory.

United Directories has also found value in a variety of other features that are part of the FAXCOM Anywhere solution. Installation was simple and the powerful online tracking and reporting tools make it even easier for them to manage their fax traffic and integrate that information into their existing systems. The most important feature, however, has been FAXCOM Anywhere’s flexible customization options combined with Biscom’s legendary engineering support. “When we first started looking for a hosted fax provider we simply didn’t see many people offering an enterprise-class solution,” said Mr. Gregory. “Most were low-level and built for small businesses. Some of the larger competitors were geared towards the way they did business, not the way we did business. We saw a lot of cookie-cutter stuff, but FAXCOM Anywhere was the only provider that had their own technology and an in-house development team. Biscom listened to our problems and came up with a tailor-made solution that met our needs.”

Biscom Inc.
Biscom was founded in 1986 and pioneered the fax server marketplace, providing many of the world’s largest organizations with its award-winning FAXCOM fax servers. In addition to enterprise fax server products, Biscom also offers hosted fax services, secure file transfer and messaging solutions, file conversion software, and document workflow and automation tools. Biscom is headquartered in Chelmsford, Massachusetts.