Fax on the Go

There are a number of ways that you can send faxes when you are on the road. If you have a laptop and an Internet connection, you're loaded for bear. You can do practically anything you can do in your office.

If you have access to a computer with reasonably secure remote access, you can use that to log into your main computer and work as if you were in your office.

Even if you only have a web enabled phone, Palm phone or Blackberry you can use Internet fax software to send faxes.

You certainly can send faxes of standard office documents but you can even get images of hand drawn items of graphical images by using either the camera on your phone or downloading the image from a digital camera. ScanR provides software for Blackberries and various phones that not only takes pictures but converts documents into text using OCR (optical character recognition) software.

You can capture those documents that they won't let you take with you with your digital camera or ScanR. ScanR will give you an instantaneous document that can be modified. Digital camera images can be scanned on your computer with OCR.

Your faxing can be accomplished with varying degrees of communication with your home or office computer.

1. Remote Control Software - If you have your own PC or a secure PC which you are sure has not been infected with keylogging software that will capture what you type, you can use a program like Logmein or GoToMyPC which will allow you to control your home or office computer while on the road. The only software you would need on your remote computer would be Logmein or GoToMyPC access software which can be downloaded from the web. This would look and feel like you were at your main computer.

2. Computer Fax Software on Your Laptop or Remote Computer - You would not have access to your email client program with you email history unless your email was using something like Outlook on an Exchange server. You could get access to your latest emails on the web. If you chose not to remove emails from your webmail when you used Outlook or Outlook Express or other email clients, you would have your history on your website.

Working in this way would probably be somewhat different from the way you are used to working but you could do all the things that you could do in your office except for printing unless you had access to a printer or brought along a personal printer.

3.Fax Software on Your PDA or Blackberry - You could theoretically do everything that you can do with a laptop on these devices but it might be somewhat cumbersome to work on a small screen and an uncomfortable keyboard. You might have some capacity limitation due to the limited capabilities of the micro device.

Generally all you need is your trusty computer or even just your smart phone or PDA. However, you may want the reassurance of being able to scan, print or connect under all circumstances.

1. Scan - You can scan documents with a portable scanner, take digital pictures of them or even have the digital images converted into text using ScanR software on your digital camera.

A sample portable scanner that looks like a wand is the a>.

2. Print - Portable printers are available with a very small form factor so that they are easy to take along. The .Canon BJC 80 Portable Printer is a good example.

3. Connecting Anywhere - You can connect your cell phone or BlackBerry handheld device to your notebook with a tethering cable to access wireless broadband networks. Alternatively, you can get a mobile broadband device which is built into your laptop which can connect to a wireless broadband network anywhere that the network is available.