Hello all,

This is particularly for maverick and his guys, and anyone else who has relevant suggestions.

I guess you probably can't say too much untill you launch whatever you are going to launch, but what can you tell me about your plans for faxing services via VFX/Fusion?

I am thinking of getting my dad, who is a real estate agent, a little more into the 21st century later this year when I'm back from Canada, probably with a Naked DSL plan or similar and I want to help him to work mobile a bit more with a laptop/smartphone type solution. One of the issues though is faxing. Being a real estate agent he does tend to need to send documents and whatnot to people a fair bit. He is doing a lot of this via email now, but still needs to use faxing reasonably often.

Now I have seen you are planning some type of email-fax and vice-versa system, but i'm interested to know whether it will be a straight email-fax service (eg send an email with the fax number as the subject and attach a .doc or PDF) or whether it will be a bit more streamlined into other applications. Basically, I am wondering if it will be somewhat like Telecom's eFax service - where you can have software that installs a print driver which captures documents from applications or a scanner and seamlessly sends them to their eFax servers for distribution.

He's not the most computer literate of people (he tries, but the more simple and integrated something is the better) but I would like to be able to port both his landline and faxability numbers to Fusion, have the faxability number as an incoming fax number for some eFax-esque service such that people can still send faxes to his local 'fax' number and have them show up in his email inbox (thus he can receive them at home on his PC/laptop/smartphone or at the office via webmail). Also, I would like him to be able to 'print' (or in some cases hit a fax button from within say an MS Office application, kind of like making a PDF) to fax from his computer, and importantly it needs to be sent with his number as the CLID & fax header (ie when people receive a fax from him, it needs to say from 'Mr Suchandsuch 647xxxxxxx). Also for legal purposes (seeing as he often faxes contracts) he needs to be able to get transmission confirmation receipts just like physical faxes provide. Ideally he would be able to do this from home as well as his (multiple) company offices, and from a smartphone or laptop/datacard with no VPN/Intranet hassles.

I know it's all entirely possible with enterprise-type setups, but I'm just talking about one guy here who would like a wholly integrated phone/broadband/faxing solution (and ideally mobile too, but VoIP/mobile unified services for the masses don't seem to have matured much yet). I figure there would be quite a few people who would love to junk their physcial faxes in the same way but can't quite get the same thing yet. Could also be an opportunity for a standalone service to get a hook-in for migrating their phone lines/broadband to you as well, particularly if discounts are dangled ;).

Cheers for any hints and suggestions,
Hamish