Crossing the Paper-Digital Divide
September 19th, 2007 (2:00pm) Anne Zelenka 8 Comments
In 1986 Roger Smith, then chairman of General Motors said, “by the end of this century, we will live in a paperless society.” He didn’t get that quite right. If you’re like me, you probably still deal with paper regularly. You need to fax something with a signature. You need to digitize a receipt or a photo. You need to receive a fax.
So what do you do? Here are a few services and tools that could help get you across the paper-digital divide. Share your own ideas in the comments.
Online faxing: eFax and FaxZero
eFax lets you send and receive faxes by email. With a pro account at $19.95 a month, you get a local or toll-free fax number, 130 free incoming fax pages a month, and a year of online fax storage.
FaxZero will send a one-page fax for free and you don’t even have to sign up for an account, or you can send up to a 15-page fax for $1.99.
Web-based contract management: EchoSign
EchoSign automates the contract signing and tracking process. Unfortunately, it only makes paper obsolete if the business issuing the contract uses it. You might find that many contracts you have to deal with aren’t provided electronically, with option for electronic signature. In that case, you’ll have to look to some other solution.
If you are dealing with a business that doesn’t use EchoSign and you don’t want to or can’t use paper (you’re working out of a cafe, for example), you can still handle contracts entirely electronically. Web Worker Daily readers suggest you use a scanned copy of your signature and paste it into documents that you receive and send using an online fax service.
Easy scan-to-PDF: Fujitsu ScanSnap
The Fujitsu ScanSnap only takes a little bit of space on your desk compared to a flatbed scanner, digitizes straight to PDF, and gets good reviews from users. It will scan both sides of a piece of paper in one pass, provides OCR via Acrobat Standard, and scans up to 15 pages per minute.
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8 Comments Post your own comment
Jason Sares says: September 19th, 2007 2:39pm
I’ve used http://faxzero.com to send a fax but I don’t use it often so I can’t really say how well it works.
Here’s the specs from their site:
Free!
Ad on the cover page
Fax 1 document—maximum 3 page
Maximum 2 faxes per day
Justin says: September 19th, 2007 2:51pm
For printed mail, I’m quite fond of Postful. But then, that’s to be expected…
Mike Stankavich says: September 19th, 2007 3:30pm
I’ve had very good success with http://www.faxage.com for faxing. Their Lite plan is 3.49/month + 0.05/min.
Rick says: September 19th, 2007 8:26pm
Hi - I work with scanR - great solution for copying and faxing right from your camera phone. http://www.scanr.com
Web Worker Daily » Archive The Paperless Web Worker « says: February 10th, 2008 6:14am
[...] from coming into the office. But you don’t have to hang on to most of it: scanners like the Fujitsu ScanSnap can quickly turn just about any paper into searchable PDF files. My own daily workflow now includes [...]
Web Worker Daily » Archive The Fax Machine: Reports of its Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated « says: April 18th, 2008 7:01am
[...] most of these reasons, getting an e-fax account with an attached fax number will be sufficient. Let’s face it - until the whole world bends [...]
bex says: April 18th, 2008 10:33am
I use fax1.com for my outbound faxing. Very low cost, no contract.
Web Worker Daily » Archive 4 Upgrades for Your Personal Workspace « says: May 26th, 2008 11:00am
[...] top of things and not getting distracted. After six months with it, I’m still loving my $430 Fujitsu ScanSnap. Coupled with a copy of EagleFiler and a cheap shredder, it gets me as close to the paperless [...]