Here are 2 great home office tools for you. Free Conference Calls & Internet Faxing

Free Conference Calls

Most people probably have a 3 way calling option on their home or cell phone. But when you need to do a conference call with 4 or more people, you need a regular conference calling line. Free Conference calls is a great option for this. You can sign up for free at:

http://www.freeconference.com/Home.aspx

The one I signed up for was the Conference on Demand option on the right side of the home page.

The signup process is quick and easy. It took me about 5 minutes. Once you sign up they assign you your own individual phone number and 6 digit access code. They will send you links to the instruction pages on how you can manage the calls. As the moderator, you can do things like mute all of the participants, except yourself and lock the call so when everyone you expect is on the call you can lock out anyone else calling in.

On their FREE version, you can have a conference call with up to 150 people and can have a call up to 3 hours! This is amazing, that we have all this free technology available to us. Of course, their game plan is to hook you on the free one and as your company grows, they hope you will sign up with their paid version. Or that you will refer friends in bigger companies that need the paid version. But I know many people who have used this over the years, and I’ve been using it about 3 months, and have had no problems with their free version.

So when I need to do a conference call, I just send out an email to the people who need to be on the call. All you need to send them is this (once you get yours, you can send your conference call #)

1 (712) 555-4857 (NOT A REAL NUMBER)

Access Code: 183077 then hit the # key

That’s all they need (and the time for the call.)

Once you sign up, Free Conference Calls leaves you alone. I haven’t received one email or call from them since I signed up. (Of course, an email could have been routed to my spam folder and I wouldn’t have seen it.)

This is a great service and I highly recommend it.

Internet Based Faxing

About six months ago, my wife and I moved to a new state. In our other house I had kept 2 phone lines, one for voice and one for my fax line. When we moved, I decided to sign up for DSL internet access. Which means I had lots of lines and phone filters everywhere. I decided I didn’t want to have a second line in the house just for faxing, partly because where we moved in was going to be temporary and partly because I would have had to pay for installing the second line because they didn’t have one.

But I still needed an inbound fax line somehow. And I didn’t want to have to connect my voice line to the fax machine every time someone wanted to send me a fax. Your inbound fax line has to be active 24 hours a day, because you never know when someone will send you one. After doing some internet research, I decided on a service by TrustFax. They have a comprehensive service which will allow you to receive inbound faxes using a toll free number and the ability to send your electronic files, such as Word documents or PDF format documents outbound.

For the inbound service when someone sends you a fax, it is converted to a PDF document and emailed to your email address. It has a document name like:

Fax_1539160111200836372.pdf

So when I get the email I usually save it right away with a name I’ll remember into one of my folders. This works out great for me, because I can then email that document to other people if I need to. And I actually do that quite often.

The cost for the plan I signed up for is $4.95 per month for the monthly service, which is a lot cheaper than the $21.95 per month I paid for the second phone line in California. There is also a separate charge of .10 cents per transmitted page, which they bill you for in as low as $5.00 increments. You can pay more if you have heavy faxing needs. In the six months I’ve been using it, I’ve paid $10.00 for the transmission charges, which is very inexpensive as far as I’m concerned.

The service will also allow you to send an outbound fax of a document that is stored on your computer. When you want to fax a Word or PDF document (or any other type, like Excel spreadsheet), it is pretty easy. You can create a cover sheet and enter the fax number to send it to. Then you have an option to copy a file from your computer to your TrustFax account area. All you need to do is to “browse” your computer and folders to find the document you need and then click the “upload” button. Once the file has been copied, you just pick it from a list in your filing cabinet. Once you hit the send button it will send the cover sheet and your document to the fax number you have entered. After it has completed the fax sending, it will send you an email on the result, whether it is successful or fails for any reason.

In your account area you have the ability to track all of your faxes, review ones you have sent, look at the ones that have been faxed to you. The interfaces are easy to use and well laid out. You can also create an address book for people you fax often.

I have also used it as an easy way to send signed “scanned” documents back to someone. For example, some people want you to email them back your signed copy of an agreement or contract. On my computer, it is a pain to scan a document and save it in order to be able to email it to someone. I can actually fax the document to my inbound fax # and TrustFax will email it back to me in PDF form. Then I can email that to my contact. For me it is quicker to do this than to scan each page and save them in a form that can be emailed. This does require a fax machine or fax/printer type of equipment in your office.

I would recommend TrustFax as an inexpensive faxing option. There are other choices available on the internet also for doing this, so you have several options. But it is a handy tool if you don’t want to have a second phone line in your house and on your bill.

Best regards,

Steven Currie

931-647-4333

stevencurrie2@bellsouth.net

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