Venali’s faux fax over IP may be better than real FoIP

Venali may not be true FoIP (fax over IP), which uses specific protocols over an IP network, but the bottom line is: Who cares?

What I want is an integrated network faxing solution that won’t cost me a bundle in new hardware and an even bigger bundle in ongoing maintenance while delivering an average uptime of only 85 percent. Venali’s Total Desktop Fax Solution fulfills my wish.

Venali successfully carved out a niche as a high-end fax service provider to the Fortune 2000, so it had a few bucks in its pocket to build a fax network and control it end-to-end, including all the requisite PoPs (points of presence) in between. This network processes millions of faxes per day and is highly redundant, so it was a logical step to build a highly reliable fax service for individuals or corporations.

Venali has done an excellent job supporting multiple e-mail clients and security options. In fact, if you’re running Microsoft Office 2003, installation is already done. Simply click on the Send To option in the File menu of any Office app and you’re taken to a fax service sign-up wizard (if the client hasn’t yet configured Venali), or directly to an Outlook e-mail message with the file attached. Type in the fax number and you’re faxing.

Venali assigns every user an individual fax number with options to make that number correspond to the user’s geographic location (a 212 prefix for Manhattan users, for example) or even toll-free numbers. Corporate accounts attached to an existing fax number can sign that number over to Venali and continue receiving faxes without skipping a beat.

What’s nice is that network faxing allows users to send multiple documents via a single fax, and send that fax to multiple recipients simultaneously. For corporations, Venali can be pushed out to a large number of desktops via desktop imaging or network Office installations. Office 2003 users also get the benefit of secure fax tokens, which match faxes to authorized users.

If Office 2003 is not your game, never fear. Venali works with most e-mail clients, and supports most document formats including Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Acrobat PDF, Plain Text, RTF, TIFF (Groups 3 and 4), Adobe Postscript (Apple Laser Writer Plus), HTML, ASCII Files, PCL5, VSD, BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, PCX, DCX, and compressed documents (WinZip). Venali also offers a Web client that can

be used standalone or integrated into existing applications.

Aside from encrypting all fax traffic, Venali also has a useful junk fax database. The product of two years of junk fax gathering, this database automatically culls out known junk faxes and routes them to a Junk Fax folder in your Outlook folder tree.

For an additional cost, corporations can opt to have Venali store their fax documents for them — an easy way to archive valuable fax information in an off-site location while maintaining Web access. Corporations with large traffic volumes can also use dedicated lines to Venali’s PoPs or establish dedicated VPN tunnels devoted solely to fax traffic to speed fax delivery.

After configuring my account on Venali’s Web site, I followed the Fax Service wizard from within Office 2003. Setup took less than 10 minutes; times may vary, especially if you have specific requirements for your fax number. I sent test faxes that arrived flawlessly and within seconds. I then sent a couple of faxes with bad fax numbers; in each case an error

e-mail came back in less than five minutes.

Finally, I had a buddy send me legitimate faxes and a few junk faxes culled from his fax pile. It all wound up where it was supposed to be: legitimate traffic in my Inbox, junk traffic in the Junk Fax folder. I do wonder why Venali doesn’t simply route the bad fax traffic directly to the junk e-mail folder — it would mean one less click on the Empty button.

Overall, Venali is simple to deploy, works like a charm, and costs less than traditional faxing solutions in most network situations. If Venali isn’t FoIP, then true FoIP may have met its match.