Faxing is rather like a monster in horror films – no matter how much you might try to get rid of it, it just won’t die. The problem is that faxing is the life blood of so many industries such as insurance and realty that we’re doomed to have faxes around for many years to come (and to also be the recipients of endless junk faxes but that’s a topic for another column).

If you still have the need to use faxes (which actually is the case for many companies simply because they would rather have one less type of equipment to deal with) then a service like Protus should look very attractive.

Protus provides both low and high volume fax services (as well as voice broadcast service) for consumers and small businesses as well as large businesses that allow you to send and receive faxes using the Web and or e-mail. What is particularly interesting however is the ability with the corporate services to send and receive faxes using Web services.

The MyFax XML Web Services are accessed using either simple HTTPS posting with basic URL encoding or SOAP over HTTPS using XML structured data. Fax submission uses a single method while receiving includes Query Available Faxes, Download Faxes by Time, Download Faxes by ID, Delete Stored Faxes by Time, Delete Stored Faxes by ID, and reporting includes detailed XML and Comma Separated Values data for status and history.

The really cool thing about the MyFax XML Web Services is the potential for integrating faxing with enterprise applications. In fact using tools such as XMLStarlet or Stylus Studio SML Enterprise Edition you could take files of captured output from legacy applications and fax-enable them.

The thing that amuses me is that you know that over and over again businesses that are incapable of abandoning faxing will wind up with one company sending XML data to the services such as Protus to fax out to other companies using similar services to receive faxes where they will get transformed into XML data to be OCR’ed to be edited and sent out as XML data to … an endless chain of transformations all predicated upon the belief that faxing is required as the common transport!

I suspect that faxing will be around long after I shuffle of this mortal coil so it looks likely that Protus will be in business for a long time to come.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.