Most group email applications also provide capabilities for contact management, scheduling and task assignment. Equally important is a network's ability to provide a simple organization-wide conduit for Internet email, so that your staff can send and receive email with their colleagues, contacts and constituencies outside of your organization as easily as they do with fellow staff members. Where appropriate, attaching documents to Internet email is dramatically faster, cheaper and easier than faxing them. This reduces paper consumption and printer usage and is more convenient for staff. Network faxing applications can be integrated with email contact lists, and faxes can be sent to groups of recipients.
Specialized hardware is available for high-volume faxing to large groups.
Incoming faxes can also be handled by the network and forwarded directly to users' computers via email, again eliminating the need to print a hard copy of every fax - and leaving the fax machine free for jobs that require it. In our increasingly mobile world, staff often require access to their email, documents or other data from locations outside of the office. A highly desirable network function, remote access allows users to dial in to your organization's network via telephone and access all of the same network resources they can access when they're in the office. Shared Databases Shared databases are an important subset of file sharing. Sophisticated database server software ensures the integrity of the data while multiple users access it at the same time.