In what it says is an Australian first, 'virtual fax' service FaxMate is giving its customers the option of receiving faxes into Google Drive, Google's cloud storage service.

Craig Halliday, CEO of BetterOff Networks, the company behind FaxMate, said that faxing into Google Drive offered businesses even more benefits than FaxMate's fax-to-email service.

"Your faxes are received as PDF files into Google Drive, so you can immediately

share them with your colleagues locally or on the other side of the world, with the advantage of being securely backed up off-site in Google's cloud.”

“You can then leverage the powerful indexing and search features of Google Drive. Google Drive indexes text in PDFs so you can search for keywords in each fax.”

Halliday continued "Our customers who have been using FaxMate since 2004 said they wanted something more reliable than delivery of fax to emails. By giving them the option of having their faxes delivered to Google Drive we've made that a reality.

For customers presently using FaxMate's fax-to-email service, switching to Google Drive is simple. Customers visit www.faxmate.com.au/google-drive, follow the signup process, validate their Google ID and authorise FaxMate to save to a FaxMate folder in their Google Drive. 

"Robert Dybala, Business Development Manager from Myconnect said "We need a quick turn around time on our faxes and the ability to receive faxes and automatically share them with the entire team via Google Drive saves a great deal of time, the ability to keyword search inside faxes is brilliant."

Halliday added “despite the popularity of email and other communications technologies, faxing is still an essential business tool for the reliable transmission of documents. Unlike email, a fax receipt has a legal value."

 “Many industries rely heavily on fax and with the recent emphasis on reducing costs, companies are outsourcing fax at an increasing rate."

"The Integration of FaxMate with Google Drive provides additional functionality and reliability for companies wishing to outsource their fax requirements from those with a stand alone fax machine through to those with their own fax server”

“Companies managing and supporting their own Fax Server infrastructure can benefit from the economies of scale in outsourcing their fax services to FaxMate avoiding line rental, equipment maintenance, hardware depreciation, software license fees and other associated costs.”

FaxMate personal plans start from $A9.90 per month, corporate plans from $A19.80 per month.

FaxMate is a registered Trademark owned by BetterOff Networks Pty Ltd.

www.faxmate.com.au