Just about every office in the world has a fax machine, but remarkably, surprisingly few of them take advantage of the latest fax technology. The last time I worked in an office (some 18 years ago), sending a fax was always a great excuse to get away from my desk, and take more than a couple of  detours on my way to the fax machine. On more than one occasion, that detour took me out the front door and over to the pub next door.

Fax over IP (FoIP) technology is really quite simple, it’s surprising that so few companies use it. Maybe it’s just for that reason–it takes away one of our most cherished excuses to goof off.

Seriously, today it’s remarkably easy to implement, especially given that most companies are connected to the Internet and may even have an internal IP network as well. FoIP just eliminates the old-fashioned standalone fax machines, and instead sends faxes straight from the desktop over the Internet. No need to go to the fax room down the hall! If you have a hosted VoIP service, chances are, this functionality is incorporated in your package; if you run your own internal IP PBX, it’s still easy to integrate the service internally.

You may still need the old-fashioned fax machine for sending the occasional graphical document that wasn’t created on the computer, business plans scratched out on the back of a cocktail napkin and the like, but there’s little doubt that FoIP is going to save time and money, and improve productivity (until people figure out another excuse to goof off, anyway). To run it in-house, the process starts with a fax server and a little integration with the email client, which lets a fax be sent directly from the email client right on the desktop. This approach also gives users a good way to organize and save faxes, since they are visible just like stored emails.

You may also want to incorporate encryption, depending on the sensitivity of faxes that are being sent–although in reality, sending faxes over the Internet is no less secure than sending faxes over a standalone fax machine. The latter option is typically very public, and a sensitive fax can sit in the tray of a common fax machine for several minutes, or even hours, for everyone to see until the intended recipient picks it up.

It’s inevitable that the old-fashioned standalone fax machine is going to go the way of the Model-T, and fax will be just another function that is taken care of at the desktop level, right alongside email and IP telephony.