eFax Corporate Makes It Easy to Integrate Cloud Faxing With Your MFPs

As the leading provider of hosted, cloud fax solutions for businesses, we receive many questions from IT professionals investigating the possibility of moving their organization’s fax infrastructure to the cloud. Some of the most common:

  • Can eFax Corporate guarantee high availability and uptimes for our faxes? (Yes.)
  • If we fax by email, do you offer highly-secure transmission options? (Yes.)
  • Will we be able to access our archived faxes anytime, and produce a clear audit trail of any fax transmission if needed? (Yes.)
  • Can we scale up or down whenever we need to? (Yes.)
  • Will your cloud fax solutions help us comply with regulations such as HIPAA? (Yes.)

But many organizations — particularly those in paperwork-heavy industries such as healthcare, real estate and law — also need to know if, by migrating from onsite faxing to a cloud fax model, they lose their ability to send a paper fax when needed. (Our answer: No.)

Easily integrate your multifunction printers into a cloud fax service — and send paper faxes anytime

With eFax Corporate, your business enjoys all of the time saving benefits of faxing digitally by email. But when you need to send a “wet ink” signature, and only a paper fax will suffice, your employees can still scan that signed paper document on any networked MFD in the office, and fax it by email right from the glass.

What’s great about MFP integration with eFax Corporate is that every paper fax your business sends or receives through your MFPs secures many of the same benefits as your digital faxes.

This means that paper faxes sent from MFPs in your office can be automatically archived in your eFax Corporate account, securely, 24/7/365, at our state-of-the-art, geographically redundant, Telco-grade data centers. These faxes are easily accessible online, anytime, for the life of your eFax account.1 And a log of the fax transmission appears in your Administrative Module, where you can track and monitor fax usage across your organization.

3 options for integrating cloud faxing with your MFPs

eFax Corporate is both versatile and flexible, giving you three popular methods for integrating cloud faxing with your MFDs, allowing you to meet the specific faxing demands of your business.

For each of the following integration options, all you need to do is configure your MFPs to ensure that they are communicating with both your corporate network and your mail server. For some advanced features, like using pre-configured fax number “hot buttons,” you’ll also need to ensure your MFPs support Integrated Internet Fax Services.

Option 1: Basic Enterprise MFP Integration

This configuration is the easiest to set up and easy to maintain, and allows any employee in the office to send a fax without having to have an individual eFax account – making it a great option that will meet your small business faxing needs.

For this option, simply create an eFax® user account for the MFP using its email address for sending and receiving faxes. When an employee needs to send a paper fax, they use the scan-to-email function on the MFP and address the outgoing fax using: [email protected]

Inbound faxes and confirmation receipts are emailed to the printer for automatic printing, or they can be configured to be copied to shared directories. You may also elect to enable custom cover pages for each MFP with an eFax Corporate account.

Option 2: Enterprise MFP Integration with Active Directory or LDAP

In this option, your employees scan paper documents on any networked MFP — and then use the MFP’s control panel to send faxes by email directly through the cloud, using their personal eFax Corporate account. This option allows for granular reporting and a clear audit trail and tighter physical security since login to the MFP is required.

To set up the integration, you’ll need to create an eFax user account for every person in the office who’ll be using fax services and tie each user to your Active Directory or LDAP for user authentication.  

When sending a fax, users log in to the MFP and use the scan-to-email function, and then address the outgoing email using: [email protected]  In this scenario, faxes appear to come from the sender, not from the printer – a much more personalized and direct workflow. The sender receives a delivery confirmation directly to their work email – convenient and efficient!

Option 3: Enterprise MFP Integration with the eFax Corporate MFP Fax Direct Feature

This final scenario fully leverages our MFP Fax Direct Feature to enable any employee in your company to fax through the eFax network using any networked MFP in your office — without having to have their own personal eFax account. It also allows for the greatest flexibility and simplicity of integration, yet still delivers the benefits of granular reporting and clear audit trails without the overhead of setting up an eFax account for each employee and Active Directory integration.  

To set this up, create an eFax account for each MFP in the organization, making sure to use the device’s email address. To send a fax, each employee uses the scan-to-email function, but instead of using [email protected] as usual, they can specify SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) parameters in the recipient’s address. These parameters allow users to specify their OWN email address for the delivery confirmation, select custom cover pages, or even supply a client matter or departmental billing code.

The benefit here is that your organization need not have an eFax account for each user, and anyone who needs to send a paper fax may still do so from your MFPs.

Here’s an added bonus: If your organization does a high volume of outbound faxing to many of the same numbers, you may also use your MFP’s Internet fax services (called iFax Services on some MFP models) to pre-program “hot buttons” on the control panel, which makes faxing right from the MFD even easier2. These hot buttons are ideal for your employees who send faxes regularly — such as payroll, accounts payable, or customer service.

Cloud faxing with MFP integration:  The best of both worlds

Integrating your cloud fax service with your existing MFPs gives your business the best of both worlds — streamlined, cost-effective and secure3 digital faxing from any Internet-connected device, and the ability to fax paper documents when you need to.

Interested in exploring MFP fax integration for your business? Let’s talk.

1.  eFax Corporate must have storage enabled on our network for future retrieval of your fax documents.
2.  Requires MFPs with support for integrated Internet fax service.
3.  Optional TLS encryption can be enabled by eFax Corporate for your fax transmissions.