Unified Fax?

I have to admit, I have been anti-fax for years now. When businesses or individuals ask me to fax something to them my first thought is something like “Fax?? Are you sure that morse code or smoke signals wouldn’t be more efficient?” I guess my point is that I feel that faxing is antiquated and we should move beyond it. Faxing, in my mind, should be replaced by secure digital signatures, or at very least scanning signed docs and sending them as PDF file attachments in an email. I am not a fan of faxing.

That said, it seems to continue on as a mechanism for transmitting documents. This seems particularly true in legal and financial circles. Just try to buy a house without faxing something. There is no standard definition of what exactly makes up a unified communications solution, but faxing is almost universally missing from the mix.

AudioCodes, a VoIP and unified communications hardware vendor, has been running a series of webcasts on various aspects of unified communications. The latest in the series focuses on SIP-based faxing or Fax over IP (FoIP).