RingCentral is a multi-function service provider that offers fax services.
You might think that a 'jack of all' would be a 'master of none' but RingCentral does offer online fax so it is included in our list.
Signing up for RingCentral is fairly straight forward, simply follow the prompts on the website and you should get a confirmation email.
The confirmation email will provide you with a URL that will confirm your email info.
After you have completed the confirmation process you will be able to send a fax through email.
If you would like to send faxes online you will need to authorize the current PC (unless you disabled that option), and that will come through in email but after you have replied to the challenge/response system you will be able to work from the website if you choose.
RingCentral Email Fax example:
Say you wanted to send a fax to 1(866) 578-1452
With RingCentral you would email your fax documents to 8665781452@rcfax.com
When faxing globally always include the country code.
The email address for a fax sent to (0) 20 7221 1234 in the UK is +442072211234@rcfax.com
If you find that confusing or you are not interested in connecting your faxes to your email there is also an online manager you can use.
RingCentral's user pages are designed to assist you with all of RingCentral's features. If you just went with fax services, you will only need to focus on a few components.
Online manager:
The overview screen is an "at a glance" window that shows fax activity in the bottom and account info on the right.
However this page doesn't seem to allow viewing of faxes, not like the Messages tab.
When you click on the Messages tab you will get inbox, outbox, sent, and deleted folders.
Messages in these folders will have a "view" icon so you can see the actual faxes, plus you can save/forward faxes from this screen.
The Call Log tab is a bit redundant, like the Overview screen, at least for "fax only" customers. It did give me info on busy/retries, so that was slightly handy.
The Contacts page is where you'll go to add, import, and export contacts. Of particular note is direct support for contact groups, this a very handy feature for companies doing fax promotions.
If you want your logo added to the online manager screen you can pick an image and URL on the Company Settings tab. Oddly the logo will only be 34x48 which is this big:
In the same screen, under Account Security, you can remove the account validation option (no need for cookies), which is handy for larger companies with lots of fax users.
Under My Settings you'll find your assigned phone numbers, options to forward or add new phone numbers, and notification options for fax events. Additionally, you can choose the type of attachment (.PDF or .TIFF), the style of the cover sheet, and add more allowed from addresses. There is also an option to change the caller ID # you'll be giving out, and even has an option for adding a number you choose. Unfortunatley the instructions seem incomplete and we did not have a chance to test this.
Clicking on the Download tab will give you an offer to install a windows based Call Controller program that makes the service just a bit more simple to use.
Finally, on the FaxOut tab, you can manually send a fax though the web page to a destination of your choosing. Users who don't have active email accounts could use this instead of sending by email. (This page is also prefaced with instructions on using email or the desktop client.)
Testing:
In our tests sending a fax took 2-5 minutes during daytime periods, and the quality was on par with other fax services. This isn't the best we've seen, but it works well enough.
Our customer service test did not go well. RingCentral advertises 24/7 support, and it only took just over a minute to get through the voice mail prompts where we were connected to a human with a heavy accent at 4:22PM PST. Unfortunately, even though we had picked the right options, the "account validation team" was unavailable (7am-4pm weekdays) to speak to us and we were refused support because of this. The fellow offered to have someone contact us the next morning, but that was all he could do. We thanked him for trying, let him know we were merely testing the response time and didn't really need to be called back, but would be interested to see how fast that process works. No call came in the next day, but we really can't fault them since we admitted it wasn't urgent.
After our failure to get direct help the idea of checking the support forums was raised, so off we went to see how well run they are. We found that support replies were quick, usually only an hour or so after the question was posted. However in most cases the replies weren't very thorough and our team actually ended up helping some of the people asking questions. So if you have simple questions, you'll get a fast reply, but you may have to be a bit more patient with tricky questions.
UPDATE: During our final step of completing the video review we had a failed fax within RingCentral's web interface that we couldn't resend or download. We posted on the forums and the next day support replied letting us know that the engineering team was working to correct the issue, but at the time of writting this, still couldn't get to the fax. Because of this we actually had to go back and re-do that section of the video review. The time delay means we really can't review the desktop software offered by RingCentral until later.
Conclusion:
Overall, the service functions, delivers most of what it pitches, and the issues we had were not complete "show stoppers". If you find the price point is attractive, or a particular feature is interesting, we'd say give them a try, it's free for 30 days after all.
