Companies around the world embrace the WEB 2.0 ERA in their effort to achieve more while investing less and doing innovative things they have never tried before. By trying to achieve more with less, some without knowing, become greener and greener every day.

This article is about green faxing in the WEB 2.0 ERA and it will show what green faxing actually means and where green-faxing fits in the WEB 2.0 environment.

Faxing is still heavily used in industries where a securely official document sending is a must (invoices, contracts, bills): the legal services industry, the real estate industry, the financial services industry and the health segment.

I must say that none of these segments strongly use web 2.0 services. However, the world is moving ahead and the employees in each of these industries will turn to using more heavily the web 2.0 environment as time goes by. Eventually the late adopters use any service - it is just a matter of time. So, what is actually WEB 2.0?

WEB 2.0 is about doing something that would not be possible otherwise.

WEB 2.0, basically means:

• Data management and interaction by common users (no matter the data type): tagging, sharing

• Connections between people, while people are the main actors that create, share and modify data. In the previous ERA, the data chunk was the main trigger, while people were just nodes in transmitting data chunks.

Before seeing where green-fax fits, we should talk a little about what actually green faxing is and what its benefits are. At first glance, green faxing is about protecting the environment: less resources used means support for mother earth. But, going deeper into the problem we can see that less resources actually means leveraging investments in IT equipment, lower overhead and decreased direct costs.

The first green level is achieved with regular fax servers (or faxing over internet) because the sending and receiving is not dependent on paper and the person who sends/receives the fax is not waiting near the fax machine anymore. This means decreased direct costs per person.

A second green level is achieved when using virtual environments and FoIP. This, basically, means using a virtual media gateway to send the faxes via broadband. This means fewer (virtual servers involved) resources in terms of used servers and, hence, used energy and machine costs.

Now, let’s see where green-fax fits in the Web 2.0 environment.

• Data management by users: user can now tag faxes, share them (as any high quality fax server should be compatible with SharePoint) with coworkers, store them securely, search them by using an TiFF iFilter. This is in case of official documents that need to stay secure. Otherwise, a fax can be managed as any other picture.

• Relevant connections between people are secure: connection between business partners, employees (when they are dealing with official documents) or any other type of connections that deal with important documents.

And both these features are easily managed, now, by using an advanced fax server with virtual servers.

Green faxing in the WEB 2.0 environment seems like a 60-year-old millionaire in a modern sports-car looking for fun somewhere in Miami. It is basically old-with-new yielding great results. And as long as there is no better alternative (in terms of security and costs) for managing official documents, green-faxing fits perfectly in an ERA where social media similar behaviors are a must for most companies.

Visendo Software provides complete green faxing solutions that involve FoIP/ Virtual Solutions, full integration with MS SharePoint and automatic back-up for disaster recovery.