More things you can do with a phone line

A couple of months ago I did not take the option of paying for my “free fax phone ” and let the phone number expire. I do not use faxes very often so it did not make sense to pay for a fax line. Since I switched my internet access to the DSL line, my regular phone has available for other duties, such as, part-time fax duty. A couple of years ago I had acquired a second phone number with a distinctive ring. I found the distinctive ring support among the modems I purchased to be practically non-existant so this feature was not very useful since I had a free fax line. Somewhere along the way I remembered that the folks at Command Communications had a box that could probably do a respectable job with distinctive ring. When I looked up their products I found that they were priced at less than $50. So I bought a Commswitch 5500 and set it up on semi-automatic mode for distinctive ring. The semi-automatic mode keeps the Commswitch from picking up the line on regular phone calls. When a fax call comes in other line it gets routed to the fax port where my SBS fax software picks up on the first ring. Hey, it works! I am now playing with routing the fax to Sharepoint database. Routing it via email is another good option.