Evaluating enterprise software is time-consuming, and fax platforms are no exception. The right decision depends on how the platform performs in your specific environment: with your integrations, your document volumes, your compliance requirements, and your team’s workflows. A demo from a sales engineer shows you the platform’s capabilities. A free trial shows you how it actually works in your world.
Faxination’s 30-day free trial gives you access to the cloud fax platform with enough time and functionality to run a genuine evaluation. This post explains how to make the most of that 30 days: what to test, what to pay attention to, and how to structure your evaluation so that you come out of the trial period with a clear answer.
What the Faxination Free Trial Includes
The Faxination free trial provides access to the cloud fax platform for 30 days. More than 50,000 users currently use Faxination across enterprise deployments in regulated industries including banking, manufacturing, healthcare, and the public sector.
During the trial, you can evaluate the platform’s core capabilities: sending and receiving faxes, integration with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft 365, inbound document routing, the administration console, transmission logging and reporting, and the setup process for your fax numbers.
The trial is designed to give you a realistic picture of what production deployment looks like, not a curated showcase of features that may not apply to your environment.
How to Structure Your Evaluation
A 30-day trial is long enough to do a thorough evaluation if you approach it with a plan. Going in without one tends to result in a lot of exploratory clicking and not much actionable data. Here is how to use the time well.
Week 1: Setup and Baseline Functionality
The first week should establish that the platform works in your environment for your most basic use cases.
Get your fax numbers configured
Whether you are porting existing numbers or using new trial numbers, get them live early so the rest of your testing has a realistic foundation. Number portability is one of the things many organizations need to verify before committing to a platform. Faxination supports both portability and routing options that preserve existing numbers.
Send and receive test faxes through your normal workflows
If your team sends faxes from Outlook, test that. If you receive inbound faxes that route to a shared folder or a specific application, test that routing. Do not test features you will not use; test the workflows that matter for your organization.
Access the administration console
Familiarize yourself with how administrators manage users, access controls, routing rules, and settings. The usability of the admin interface matters for day-to-day operations and is worth evaluating explicitly.
Week 2: Integration Testing
Week two should be focused on the integrations that matter most to your organization.
Microsoft 365 and Outlook integration
Faxination integrates with Microsoft 365, allowing users to send faxes directly from Outlook without switching applications. Test this with your actual Outlook environment, not just a test account. Verify that attachments render correctly, that delivery confirmations come back to the sender, and that the workflow feels natural for your users.
SAP or ERP integration (if applicable)
For organizations using SAP or other ERP systems that generate automated fax sends (purchase orders, invoices, compliance documents), verify that the integration works with your system configuration. Faxination’s connector ecosystem supports SAP and a range of other enterprise platforms. This is often the most complex part of any fax platform evaluation and deserves dedicated testing time.
SharePoint or document management integration
If your inbound fax workflow involves routing documents to SharePoint or another document management system, test that routing with real document types. Verify that PDF/A archiving and OCR capture are functioning correctly if those capabilities are part of your workflow.
Shared folder workflows
Faxination’s shared folder connector captures and processes inbound documents into centralized network folders. If your organization uses shared folder-based document processing, test this workflow end to end, including multi-page documents and the file format outputs.
For context on how these integrations support broader document automation goals, see How to Leverage Fax Automation with Document Management.
Week 3: Compliance and Reporting Evaluation
Week three should focus on whether the platform meets your compliance and audit requirements.
Review transmission logs
Pull the logs from your Week 1 and Week 2 test activity. Verify that every transmission has been logged with the fields your compliance obligations require: sender identity, recipient, timestamp, page count, delivery status, and delivery confirmation. This is the audit trail that regulators and internal compliance teams will ask for. If it is not capturing what you need, that is a critical finding.
Test access controls
Set up user roles that reflect your organizational structure: standard users who can send and receive, department administrators who can manage routing and view departmental reports, and system administrators with full platform access. Verify that each role sees what it should and cannot access what it should not. Role-based access control is a fundamental compliance requirement in most regulated industries and a core component of zero-trust architecture.
Evaluate retention configuration
Confirm that transmission logs can be retained for the period your compliance obligations require. PCI-DSS 4.0 requires 12 months of retention with three months immediately accessible. HIPAA organizations typically operate under similar or longer requirements. Verify that the platform supports your specific retention policy.
Run a compliance scenario
Simulate a scenario that mirrors what you would face in an audit or a compliance review: identify a specific transmission from a specific date, pull the complete log record for it, and verify that the record includes everything an auditor would need to see. If you can do this easily, your compliance posture is sound. If it is difficult or the record is incomplete, that is important information.
For more on the compliance dimensions of enterprise fax, see Is Your Digital Document Legally Enforceable? and How Secure Faxing Fits Into a Modern Communications Stack.
Week 4: Volume, Performance, and Support Evaluation
The final week of your trial should stress-test the platform and evaluate the support experience.
Test under realistic volume
Send a volume of faxes that reflects your actual production usage over a day or a week. Verify that performance (transmission speed, success rate, queue behavior) holds up under that load. This is especially important for organizations with high-volume workflows. For reference on how Faxination handles performance at scale, see How Faxination Handles High-Volume Fax Availability Without Degrading Performance.
Test failure handling
Deliberately send a fax to an invalid number or simulate a transmission failure. Verify that the failure is logged correctly, that the retry behavior matches your configuration, and that alerting functions as expected. How a platform handles failures matters as much as how it handles successes.
Contact support with a real question
The quality of enterprise fax support is a significant differentiator between vendors. Use your trial period to have a real interaction with Faxination’s support team: not a sales question, but a technical question about your specific environment. How quickly do they respond? Do they understand your question? Does the answer reflect genuine platform expertise? For context on what enterprise fax support should look like, see What Good Enterprise Fax Support Actually Looks Like, And Why Most Vendors Fall Short.
Questions to Answer by the End of Your Trial
Before your 30 days conclude, you should be able to answer the following:
- Does the platform handle your most important use cases reliably, without workarounds or limitations that would affect production use?
- Do the integrations you need work in your actual environment, not just in a test scenario?
- Does the compliance logging meet your audit requirements, including field completeness, retention configuration, and access control granularity?
- Is the administration experience manageable for your IT team, including user management, routing configuration, and reporting?
- Did the support interaction reflect the kind of expertise and responsiveness you would need in a production incident?
If you can answer yes to all five, you have a strong basis for moving forward. If one or more of those answers is uncertain, the trial has identified the questions you need to resolve before committing.
Getting the Most Out of 30 Days
The organizations that get the most value from a Faxination trial are the ones that treat it like a production pilot rather than a casual exploration. Involve your IT team, your compliance officer, and at least one business user who sends and receives faxes regularly. Test the workflows that matter. Ask the support team real questions. Document what you find.
Thirty days is enough time to know whether Faxination is the right platform for your organization. Use it deliberately.
Start your 30-day free trial of Faxination or request a demo to walk through the platform with a Fenestrae expert before you begin.
