Recruits ready to join the UCLA football program no longer need a fax machine to signal their intent.
Two weeks ago UCLA announced that it will allow students to sign letters of intent electronically going forward, according to Bloomberg (News - Alert) Businessweek. Previously, the most popular way to signal intent was through fax.
That’s because fax is a recognized and legally binding way to transfer signatures.
With the emerging prevalence of electronic signature technology, however, UCLA now will allow recruits and their parents to use a mouse or their fingers to sign the letters on the screen of a mobile device. Letters are then sent by email both to the family and the school.
Is this the nail in the coffin for fax technology?
Frankly, no.
While electronic document signature is getting easier and more common, signing a printed document and then faxing it to the other party still is easier and more prevalent. While there are any number of technological issues that can crop up with e-signatures, it is hard to goof a handwritten signature and a fax.
This ease of use will keep the fax machine around for years to come, not to mention that it is well integrated into many business and government workflows. While it might not be the sexiest technology in 2014, it still is a relevant one despite being far from a buzz word.
The fax has evolved, too, which keeps it relevant even in the face of news like that coming out of UCLA. While most of us still think about fax machines and paper spilling out onto the floor, the fax machine now runs over the Internet and uses a technology called fax-over-IP. Whether using a cloud-based fax service or a device such as fax ATA to connect an existing fax machine to the IP network, FoIP brings a lot of new tricks to an old technology.
Among them are automatic document routing, with incoming faxing going straight to the e-mail inbox of the intended recipient.
Optical character recognition can turn faxes into searchable text files, too, and from this can come complex business “if-then” processes, which are set in motion based on the text in a fax.
The modern fax is still king when it comes to easy document signing. But it also now can deliver additional features that many people don’t even realize are part of the fax repertoire.