I.Background of Donjin e-Fax Service

“e-Fax” is a value-added telecommunication service that combines the fax and email together. The “e-Fax” user will be assigned with a telephone number to function as the dedicated fax number and with an email address as same as this fax number. Thus, when a user is sending faxes, and especially, some faxes in the form of electronic documents, it is possible to send out these faxes through the Internet without the need of either printing or telephone lines. Besides, the user can also complete the receiving of faxes over the Internet, so that the operations can be simplified and costs can be saved. However the address of an “e-Fax” user changes, his/her fax number will never changed. Even if this user is in other places or abroad, he/she can receive faxes in a most cost-efficient way. Furthermore, the email address can be easier to remember, and can be more helpful to the storage and management of faxes. For corporate users, the extension function of e-Fax service can be seamlessly integrated with the business enterprise post office so that enterprises can readily manage their own fax communications, while the super capacity group sending function of this service can realize the easy transmission of 10,000 faxes.

1.1 User Demands

Development of telecommunication technologies has led to an exceptional exuberance of information exchange means such as E-mail, IM, and SMS and so on, yet fax communication as one of most traditional communication approaches has always retained a higher utilization rate. According to statistics, the amount of information transmitted by means of faxes would account for 63% of total load of information in the manufacturing industries. Yet some problems also exist in the fax uses.

The first problem would be the management of faxes. In such enterprises as foreign trade, logistics and tourism companies where there would be frequent exchange of faxes, the number of faxes received per day would be often counted in several hundreds. Due to the paper property of fax documents, they can not be preserved for a long period, while there is also a lack of uniform standards and yardsticks for the distribution, arrangement, filing and retrieval of faxes. As a result, the management on faxes can become extremely difficult. Meanwhile, the amount of information that an enterprise sends out per day can be likewise substantial, where there are often such critical commercial correspondence papers as contracts and orders. A huge load of sending of faxes can also give rise to such abnormally complicated processes as drafting, approval and countersignature for faxes. A common case is that a critical fax to be sent can be circulated with some other unimportant faxes in the approval process of an enterprise, thus reducing the business efficiency of this enterprise to a certain degree. Faxes can be frequently exchanged between different enterprises; while there can be various levels of importance and sensitivity of fax contents. However, it is often hard to differentiate these faxes by means of the currently available traditional monitoring measures. Therefore, enterprises would have urgent demands for an effective fax management solution.

The secondary problem would be the junk faxes. Due to continual increases in the amount of social information, there has been a surge in the emergence of various kinds of useful or useless information from all quarters, while business enterprises would more often than not set up their fax machines into the state of auto receiving or sending just in case of miss of any critical fax. Consequently, it is impossible for fax machines to carry out an effective filtering of the received information, thus creating a sharp increase in the amount of junk faxes.    

According to investigations, nearly 42% of faxes would be junk faxes in a small or medium enterprise. The increased junk faxes would not only compound the mechanical wear of fax machines and consumption of toner and papers thereof, but also lead to a rise in corporate manpower costs and business costs in that business enterprises often tend to assign special personnel to search among a great pile of faxes for valid ones. 

1.2 Demands of Telecommunication Operators

Subsequent to the changes of telecommunication mechanism in recent years, there has been further development of telecommunication technologies , while the telecommunication market has entered into a phase of mutual competition between multiple operators. Nearly no discrepancy exists between the basic telecommunication services provided by different telecommunication operators, while the charging strategies of each of these operators can be easily simulated by its competitors. As such, competitions in the basic telecommunication services have become significantly intensified to result in a case of increase in the number of users with no increase in revenues and decrease in the ARPU of users. 

Exacerbation of competitions requires the telecommunication operators to further expand the volume of their services through service creations, and attain the continual growth of their revenues. While telecommunication operators are also making efforts to drive their business growth by way of data services, such services can account for insignificant shares of their total business volume all the way. According to statistics, voice services can still occupy over 80% of total business volume and especially for fixed telephone network operators, revenues accruing from their basic telecommunication services would nearly account for more than 90% of their total revenues. Therefore, Donjin Tech believes that such creations in terms of basic telecommunication services as the management of business opportunities in call traffic, integration of old and new services and organic merge of basic services and value-added voice services can provide a driving force to the effective growth in the basic telecommunication services.

Among the clients to telecommunication operators, those commercial customers and high-end personal users can play an important role in supporting the service volume. The so-called satisfaction of service needs of commercial customers refers to the practice that telecommunication operators would carry out an in-depth analysis of business modes and features of their commercial customers, make the full exploitation of service needs of such commercial customers, and embed different types of basic telecommunication service into the business processes and business logics of these customers in order to enhance and enrich the business means and methods of commercial customers and thus promote their market sales. Based on the intrinsic differentiation of their business management and their meticulous operations of low costs that are customer-oriented, these telecommunication operators can well realize a win-win situation with their commercial customers.

In those basic telecommunication services targeted at commercial customers, fax communication serves as a critical service just secondary to voice services, where the Donjin e-fax service serves just as a key creation to traditional fax services.

II. Introduction of Donjin e-Fax Service

Donjin e-Fax Service is designed and developed by Shenzhen Donjin Communication Technologies Co., Ltd in particular relevance to the needs of both telecommunication customers and telecommunication operators. 

2.1 Introduction of Use of This Service

2.1.1 Registration of e-Fax Service

Any customer that needs to use the e-Fax service can register with a local telecommunication operator supplying the fax service, and after the registration, this customer will be provided with a local telephone number and an email box number as same as this telephone number, e.g. 88886666 and 88886666@xxx.com, where the size of this email box can vary in accordance with different operators. Usually the size of email box can be approximately 20 M and 50M for personal customers and corporate customers respectively. A corporate customer can apply for the extension function of a fax number, i.e. this customer can set several extension numbers under one fax number, so that this enterprise can assign different fax numbers to its employees.

2.1.2 Sending of Fax

A user can log in the Web homepage of fax service through a PC connected to the Interne, use the client (terminal) software to send the same fax document (electronic document) to one or more fax machines. In the event that the receiving party is an e-Fax user, this fax document will sent into the email box of this opposite party.

Address Book

A user can record and manage his/her own contacts in the address book, where the user can select recipients directly from his/her address book and does not need to manually enter the contact information in the event of sending faxes.

Sending Control

After a fax is submitted for sending, the user can implement the real-time view of sending status, and can stop or cancel the sending of this fax at any time.

Resending of Fax:

In the event of an engaged line, no answer from the opposite party or circuit interruption, the fax will be automatically resent according to the preset plan to maximally ensure that every fax can be successfully delivered to the destination.

Intelligent Detection

A user can base on the urgency of a fax and on the state of utilization of fax circuits to carry out the intelligent dynamic scheduling of faxes to ensure that any urgent fax can be prioritized to send out.    When the fax machine of receiving party is set in the mode of manual off-hook, the system will automatically play the off-hook voice announce to guide the customer to hook off.

Delayed Sending

A user can designate the fax service system to send out a fax document at a certain time.

2.1.3 Receiving of Fax

When a registered user needs to receive a fax, the fax will be temporarily stored in the email box of this user. The user can log in the Web homepage of fax service through a PC connected to the Internet, or use the client (terminal) software to receive the fax into a local computer, or can count on relevant commands to receive the fax by means of an ordinary fax machine.

Forwarding of Fax A user can forward a received fax to others by way of simple operations, which can be same as those for the forwarding of emails.

Fax Management

A user can carry out such operations as view, browse, edition and forwarding of faxes in his/her personal email box, and can create multiple folders and drag the faxes into such folders for the purposes of filing and management.  

Fax Distribution

For any corporate user with the extension number function, the system can base on the extension numbers and the calling number of sending party to directly distribute a fax to the corresponding users, thereby avoiding the great consumption of manpower and material resources due to the manual distribution of faxes. 

2.1.4 User Fax Management

Users can manage their own e-fax service, where there are now 3 channels of management such as : IVR mode, which employs voice navigation to guide the users to complete the corresponding management operations; Web mode, in which the users can log in the Web homepage of service through a PC connected to the Internet; and the use of client (terminal) software to complete the e-Fax service management.

Modification of Password

Realizing the modification of passwords for sending a fax, logging into the service homepage and using an email box.

Search for Sending Records

Including such detailed records as the sending date, sending time, number of sent pages, time consumed to receive and send a fax, and number(s) at the destination(s).

Requesting Report (s)

The system will send the report(s) to a fax machine predesignated by the user Sending Fax to Email will send the fax document(s) to the email address of the opposite party.

2.2 Introduction of Service Charges

Item 　　　　　　　　　　　　Charge (Yuan)

Account Opening Fee (Temporarily exempted)　　　　　　　 50 yuan

Basic Monthly Rental  　　　　　　　　　30 yuan/month

Basic Transmission Fee　 Urban　　　　　0.22 yuan/Initial 3 minutes+0.11yuan/minute

　　　　　　Domestic　　　　　0.07yuan/6 seconds

　　　　　　Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan 　　　　0.2yuan/6 seconds

　　　　　　International 　　　　0.8 yuan/6 seconds

III. Realization of Donjin e-Fax Service

3.1 General Description of Service Bearer Platform

Donjin e-Fax Service is based on the Donjin e-Fax Service Platform to provide value-added services, as shown in figure below.

Web 服务器-Web server

邮件服务器-Mail Server

数据库服务器-database server

帐务系统-Accounting system

短信网关-SMS gateway

防火墙-firewall

传真应用服务器-Fax application server

传真平台-Fax platform

传真机-Fax machine

Donjin E-Fax Service based on the Donjin E-Fax Service platform can provide the e-Fax service to the whole province, where this platform adopts a structure of local access in different areas and centralized service processing in the provincial center. Each area will be responsible for local voice trunk access and localized IVR service, while the provincial center will be in charge of processing of core services, realization of peripheral interfaces and processing of charges, etc and will be responsible for building the marketing and customer service center.  The provincial center will construct a marketing and customer service center, where the remote operator console mode will be adopted for the switch connected to the core service network through data dedicated lines..

Application server: adopting an industrial server installed with core processing program, service application program, billing program and charge processing program to take care of the billing for various service modes.

Web server: adopting an industrial server, which is designed to receive and respond to service requests from the Internet on one hand, and to run the SMS processing program ( supporting the SGIP protocol) to submit short messages to the SMS gateway on the other hand.

Database server: adopting an industrial server, which is designed to undertake the storage of various data required for the service, record the user data and various analyzed data and service-related information, and support such mainstream database management systems as Access,SQL Server,Sybase,Oracle and so forth.

3.2.3 Service Development

Donjin e-Fax Service Platform can provide a whole set of service development interfaces, while this commercial application platform can incorporate multiple service modes of telecommunication operators and enterprises. In an open, standard system architecture, this platform integrates the unified service use environment, unified service application server(s), unified data service(s), unified service openness interface(s) and unified secondary development platform(s), while it can utilize the Donjin application function interface, database interface and flow editor both for the secondary development and for the easy and fast addition of new services. In this way, the system can follow the service and customer-oriented business management modes to satisfy the abundant and colorful and fast changing needs for commercial applications.

用户-User

服务提供商-Service provider

电信运营商-Telecommunication operator

业务层-Service layer

传真的收发、分发、控制、管理-Receiving/sending, distribution, control and management of faxes

用户权限管理、计费、业务控制-User right administration, billing and service control

实现层- Realization(Instrumentation) Layer

东进API、可视化应用接口-Donjin API and Visualization Application Interface

(Fax、SMS、E-mail、座席、外呼、系统管理、数据库.……)- (Fax, SMS, E-mail, seat, outbound call, system management, database……)

基础层-Base (Infrastructure) layer

东进传真资源、语音资源-Donjin fax resource and voice resource

电信交换网、计算机互联网-Telecommunication switching network, computer Internet.

3.3 Service Management and Maintenance

This service can offer perfect service management and maintenance tools for the service providers to conduct the effective configurations and management of this service.

3.3.1 User Right Administration

This service can accomplish the complete right control of users to ensure the fax safety. The administrator can set up different rights for different users, e.g. whether the long-distance calls can be dialed, the sending priority of faxes and whether a certain type of faxes can be viewed.

3.3.2 Service Billing

The billing system can record such information as the name of user that sends a fax, fax number of the opposite party, time length of the phone call and date & time, and can automatically calculate out the fax charges, thus making easy the operation management.

3.3.3 Configuration Management

providing a configuration interface on which to realize the edition or configuration of fax resource and thus achieve the effective utilization of such resource.

3.3.4 Log management

Managing such operations as the formation of logs of daily service status in the database, and automatic backup or manual deletion of such logs.

3.3.5 Alarm/Fault Management

Overseeing the transmission alarms, communication faults and fault notification, providing the visual alarm indication and forming alarm/fault database (logs).

IV. Operation and Promotion of Donjin Miss Call Service

4.1 Design of Service and Its Charges

This Miss Call Service can be similar to a certain degree to the super paging and secretary desktop services of mobile operators, where the Donjin Miss Call Service can either be integrated with the existing super paging and secretary desktop services, or take place of the latter completely.

According to the division of its functions, the Donjin e-Fax Service can be further designed into several sub services, where each of these sub services can be either operated independently, or combined with others to operate.

东进传真通-Donjin e-fax service

企业应用-Corporate Application

基础服务-Basic service

提供一个标准的市话号码和50M的电子邮箱-Providing with a standard urban telephone number and an email box of 50M

分机服务-Extension service.

提供最多99个分机号码,每个分机信箱容量10M;设置欢迎词-Offering a maximum of 99 extension numbers with each extension number mailbox of a capacity of 10M; setting up greetings.

传真群发-Fax group sending

个人应用-Personal application

基础服务-Basic service

提供一个标准的市话号码和10M的电子邮箱-Providing with a standard urban telephone number and an email box of 10M

短信通知-SMS notification

提供传真接收提醒-Providing the reminder service for receiving and sending of a fax.

异地提取-Different Place Extraction 

提供异地接收传真功能-Providing the function of receiving a fax at a different place

4.2 Promotion of Service

An extension and replenishment of the existing basic telecommunication services, the e-Fax Service is a functional value-added service built on top of these basic telecommunication services. In the promotion of this service, it is requisite to base on different phases of its development to apply different marketing means and measures in the introduction, growth, development and declination periods of this service respectively, as shown in the figure below:

4.2.1 Experiential Marketing

At the outset of service promotion, it is possible to advise the users by different forms of advertisement, of the free trial of this new service in a certain period in order to curtail the psychological threshold of users to access into this service so that the users can further experience the convenience and applicability that this new service brings about, thereby culturing both the market and users. It is appropriate to set up a period of free trial for one or two months, and after this trial period is over, about 20% of the users will become the registered users.

4.2.2 Web Marketing

The e-fax service can serve as a service that integrates telecommunication network and Internet together, where the potential users of this service shall be also those of the Internet. Therefore, it is possible to take advantage of the dissemination superiorities of networks to deploy the web-marketing, thus acquiring the effect of half the work with double results.

4.2.3 Channel Marketing

In the process of construction of informatization, the corporate users would lay greater emphasis on the integration of traditional business means with the information technologies, and on the facilitating effects of informatization techniques on their own services. In the promotion of this service, it is allowable to accomplish the sufficient construction of channel value chain(s) for industrial promotion, integrate such channel resources as system integrators, software developers and hardware developers, take the service requirements of industrial users as starting points, and make the exhaustive use of industrial advantages of such channels to provide service solutions for the industrial users, and expand and extend the applications of e-fax service in various industries.