Prepress

Leading Business Solutions Provider, Graphnet, Inc., Introduces a Safe and Secure Inbound Documents Delivery Feature

Wednesday 16. July 2008 - Graphnet, Inc., a pioneer in the data transport industry, today announced the addition of a new feature to its inbound fax-to-email service. The patent pending feature, called the Certified Inbound Fax Service (CIFS), ensures that incoming electronic fax messages are read in a timely manner.

Allowing clients to specify a timeframe during which received faxes should be read, CIFS monitors such messages, so that if they are not opened within that period, duplicate messages will be sent to an alternate failsafe address. Clients can incorporate their business hours and vacation days into the system, configuring the CIFS option to only count working hours and not after-hour periods, weekends, or holidays.

This means that if a client company wants its employees to read their electronic fax messages within 2 hours of receipt, it will set a timeframe of 2 hours. If the company’s hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m., Monday through Friday, then messages received, for example, by 10 a.m. Thursday will have a timeframe that ends by 12 p.m. that same day. Meanwhile, messages received by 4 p.m. on Friday will have a timeframe that ends Monday at 10 a.m., not Friday at 6 p.m. — allowing employees the flexibility to check their messages on Monday morning, instead of being hassled with duplicate messages over the weekend.

“This is revolutionary because, as far as I know, CIFS is the first feature of its kind that basically tracks when a fax email is opened and consequently undertakes a failsafe procedure when that message is not opened within a specified timeframe or if that message is not delivered properly,” says Larry Cohen, Graphnet’s Product Manager. “It’s amazingly useful because electronic delivery of faxes is never guaranteed — sometimes a user’s inbox is full and the fax bounces, sometimes the email program filters out the fax as spam, and sometimes the message gets blocked or experiences errors.”

Inbound fax-to-email services work by linking a fax number with an email destination. All faxes sent to that specific number are thereby converted into an email message by the service provider, who then transmits that message to the client’s inbox. The problem here is that sometimes the email never gets to the client because of technical issues, such as the ones detailed above. CIFS addresses these shortcomings by protecting this last link between the client’s inbox and Graphnet’s servers; immediately notifying Graphnet personnel if an error occurs in message transmission.

What makes CIFS unique, however, is not the procedure taken in the event of delivery errors, but rather the procedure taken when the received message is not opened on time. Able to send duplicate, trackable messages to alternate emails and failsafe contacts automatically, CIFS takes a step forward in providing customer-oriented, quality services for fax-to-email solutions.

As Mr. Cohen explains, “Even when messages are received without technical problems, employees might forget to read their faxes, they might be out of the office, or the fax could have time-sensitive information. Using CIFS, companies can make sure that their workers read these documents. That’s the real added-value of this feature.”