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Entries by Richard Reiffer

The 5 Best PBX Phone System Features for Businesses

When it comes to using any phone system features for your business, you need to be able to have some of the most powerful features available at your disposal. It comes down to being able to utilize the best possible features at any time to become more efficient. For PBX phone systems, there are certainly a wealth of options available. But what are the most popular features that businesses today love? Here are a four of the favorites:
1. Auto Attendant
With an auto attendant, your receptionist will have more time to work because there’s less time routing and re-routing callers to get them to the right place. The service points callers to the right extension or person by navigating them through a simple set of recorded options. Doing this means that fewer inbound calls need a live operator, saving the company both time and money.

 
2. Voicemail Transcription
Voicemail transcription takes your voicemail messages and puts them into text before sending them to you via email or text message. People find this option to be ultra convenient when it may not be an option to pull a phone out and listen to an entire message. If you can see the words written right in front of you, you can respond accordingly when it makes the most sense to do so.

 
3. Active Call Controls
When you think about the current VOIP options for a new phone system, some of the most powerful options include having the ability to control …

VoIP Solutions for Small Business: The Hybrid Cloud

Driving innovation with greater control and security, the hybrid cloud is slowly changing the face of VoIP solutions for small businesses. A small business today can reap immense benefits with this more robust communication solution that not only gives you the scalability and speed of public cloud, but also arms you with the ultrafast performance of dedicated servers.
What is the Hybrid Cloud?
A hybrid cloud is not a place, but a model that prioritizes speed and efficiency across the public, private, and dedicated cloud environments, offering the greatest flexibility possible. While the on premises and cloud-based deployments are the standard stand-alone options, hybrid deployments are meant for businesses of all sizes as it combines best of both worlds to suit a growing organization.

Simply put, the hybrid cloud offers the perfect solution for every problem without the user having to abandon the established organization systems.
What are the Benefits of Hybrid Cloud?

Your company can experience cost-savings because the system is a more affordable alternative.
Better service, even if you have a large-scale centralized corporate office in multiple, geographically dispersed locations.
Make the best use of cell phone redirecting, digital call forwarding, extension monitoring, intercom service, and call recording.
Better manage and secure data applications regardless of their platform and cloud location.
Get continuous availability, infinite capacity, and have lower expenditure on storage without needing to buy more infrastructure.

Additional Benefits
The in-house component of the hybrid cloud also has the advantage of being under your IT …

How VoIP is Bringing Faxing Back

Most of us can know that annoying and loud sound a fax machine makes to send an important document to another client or business. However, it’s a sound that has diminished significantly from our office environments over the last ten years due to its inconvenience, communication errors, and of course, all the waiting for something to send out.

However, things are now shifting to a new and improved faxing process, all thanks to VoIP technology.

How VoIP is Changing the Game

Even with technological advancements, many businesses find that they still need faxing to send certain types of information, thus making it an unpopular, but necessary item. However, improved technologies have paved the path for a more convenient alternative that works as a fax, but without the bulky equipment, noise, and waiting times.

VoIP technologies partnered with a phone system allows businesses to use fax technology over the Internet. A VoIP solution provides a variety of ways you can send and receive faxes through your phone, tablet, computer, or email. This new functionality means you don’t have to be tied to a physical location where the fax machine sits, which fosters a more productive workforce.

How Does it Work?

With VoIP faxing you still have a fax number and a phone line, but the data is transferred digitally over the Internet. A traditional phone line works using an analog system and tiny electric pulses. A digital fax works by moving the data to a binary format which controls …

Getting the Most Out Of Your Remote Employees

Whether your firm is adding to its remote workforce, or just beginning the process of incorporating remote workers into the company, there are numerous things to consider.

Whether you’re evaluating an existing employee as a remote worker, or interviewing a potential new hire for remote work, an individual’s skills and his/her ability to self-manage are obviously a necessary item. It’s important to establish and maintain a trust level with each remote worker. But beyond that, there are a number of additional items to keep in mind:
Provide the Necessary Equipment
With a remote workforce, it’s important to maximize communication through the use of technology that is meaningful for your particular industry. This may include the installation of a cloud-based or hybrid phone system. Additionally, you may want to evaluate allowing the remote employees to operate within a “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) policy for their mobile devices.
Schedule Regular Meetings
Some organizations schedule weekly video conference calls across various geographic regions to accomodate the remote workforce. The participants include different levels of related management and remote workers. The exchange of information keeps everyone in the loop, discussing the strategies that are working for the business and those that are not. Any new techniques used or tested are shared and discussed.

Depending on the proximity between remote workers and management, occasional face-to-face meetings might also provide advantages in order to instill a sense of belonging within the organization.
Discuss Schedules
For many remote workers, one of the benefits of working remotely is a flexible schedule. …

A New VoIP System May Cause a Shift From CAPEX to OPEX

Finding ways to produce savings for a company heavily reliant on communication systems and networking can often seem challenging. However, the ability to run a phone system over the Internet, or Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP), clearly shows how traditional systems fare in comparison to the efficiency and savings of better tools. However, what also occurs when one introduces new technology platforms often includes ripple effects, and that’s where we get into the discussion about how to define the financials of an internet-based communication system.

Understanding CAPEX, OPEX, and VoIP

Historically, significant network changes and communications systems fell into the same bucket as infrastructure, which made them capital expenditures, or “CAPEX” for short. These costs frequently gained support through long-term financing, bond financing, or investment. They were rarely classified as operational expenses, or “OPEX” for short. Part of the reason tended to be due to accounting needs. Spreading the cost of an entire VoIP system change as a direct cost per unit produced or service provided was extremely hard, if not impossible mathematically, and then one had to explain that inflation to a client in pricing. Instead, most companies treated a VoIP charge as an overhead cost and built in the expense with an indirect rate added to a unit produced price via markup.

Why the Change?

With newer VoIP, you take away the old PBX hardware, then things become quite scalable financially. Because the service comes from a service provider, and the actual …

What’s a Project Implementation Plan?

A project manager’s job today very much resembles that of a ship captain in the 1800’s, having to think about every aspect of the boat while getting it safely from point A to point B in a timely manner. There tends to be no down time from the start to finish of a project, with every moment and every hour a consideration about what else could impact the project.

The sailing map for the project captain, however, doesn’t resemble some artistic cartography. Instead, the old-school charts and timelines are replaced by a more sophisticated project implementation plan. This set of documentation collectively details every step, phase, date and tasks of how the given project comes together. As a result, the project manager’s job involves not just creating the plan, but also ensuring compliance with the project.

The project implementation plan often provides the project manager a checklist as well as a set of performance metrics of expected results to aim for by each date or stage. Psychologically, a well-structured plan of progress usually provides better results than going into a project simply guessing how to proceed day-to-day. When used for benchmarking, the implementation plan may provide an early signal that project work might be steering off the rails and heading in the wrong direction. Finally, the plan lays out an approach that all the team members on the project understand and can reference.

A typical implementation plan appears as a large document with lots of …

Intelligent Voice and Data Solutions: Benefits of “Find Me” Call Routing

The world of technology continues to explode around us, providing new ways to find and send information. And while many businesses today are working to create intelligent voice and data solutions that consolidate data handling, voice communication remains a necessary and important part of the equation.

The Modern PBX

Today, VoIP-based PBX systems have the capability of additional services versus just delivering a call. Because their fundamental structure is a component of a network, their service potential is only limited by what the system can provide. That means there are possibilities for not just voice delivery and the expected voicemail storage, but also the capability of adding additional services, such as Find Me/Follow Me features.

Find Me Options

With older systems, when a person wasn’t at their desk, it required another person to route the call to where the recipient would be. Doing so requires planning, scheduling, multiple phone numbers and a person managing the connection. With Find Me/Follow Me features in the phone system, numbers on VoIP PBX systems become mobile, and the ability to connect goes to wherever the recipient happens to be. Rather than an urgent call transferred to voicemail, which the recipient has to reconnect physically with the network to retrieve, the call routes to a variety of locations both in the system and externally. If a recipient is on the go, the desk number can be easily connected to a cell phone. And if the recipient is still unable to answer, the message can …

10 Unexpected Benefits of VoIP Phone Systems

Most business managers align themselves to the idea of implementing a VoIP phone systembecause it has one primary attractive feature: cost savings when compared to traditional phone lines and data transfer. However, when folks get a chance to dig into the details of all that VoIP can offer, the strategic benefits begin to appear. Here are ten somewhat unexpected benefits that VoIP can provide once installed:

1. Fast Data Transfer – Because VoIP utilizes the Internet as the transfer conduit, the system is only as slow as the channel it uses to move through. So, a basic 100 Mbps channel may seem slow at first, but put the VoIP on a CAT 5 channel or faster, and its speed capability begins to shine in daily use.

2. User-Friendly Connection – The hardware involved doesn’t require a degree in rocket science to get desks connected. Once the system gets set up and operating on the office network, the handsets for voice use simply have to be plugged in by Ethernet cable to the same grid. Each node then has a designated number which can be moved as easy as the employee is moved around the office.

3. Quality Performance – With a VoIP system, it will test slightly lower than the best landline connection, but most homes and offices are slapped together with short deadlines and low-cost contractor material, which means physical tests for performance don’t always reflect the practical function. Performance is noticeably a bit less where data becomes congested …

Breaking Down the Features of Mitel Connect Cloud

First established in 1996, Mitel entered the phone market with its IP Telephony venture in 1998 at the beginning of the Internet explosion in office communications. Since that time, Mitel has expanded its offerings with its desktop management products, mobility services and connections, and cloud services some 20 years later. Today, Mitel Connect Cloud brings all of its past services to bear with the massive scalability of the cloud, allowing both small and large businesses to enjoy the same benefits, many of which were previously only available to enterprise-size systems.
Unified Communications at the Forefront
The key factor in Mitel’s Cloud design is a focus on unified communications. Instead of disparate systems and multiple individual units, Mitel’s approach aims at wrapping all of a company’s communication assets together into one woven system for seamless crossover and sharing. Further, Mitel’s latest features are expanding the same benefits to the mobility side, allowing connection and access to the same information databases and assets while company personnel are on the road, boosting productivity while traveling.

These mobile features include:

Worker location and presence along with traditional digital communications tools.
Seamless switching between databases of contacts, events, file information, and calendaring.
Multiple digital communication channel switching and management to control more than one conference at a time.
Agenda management tools and timers for meeting benefit control.
Intuitive app design for easy learning and adaption to mobile tools provided by Mitel for Cloud connecting.
Secure connection without the delay of VPN …

A 10-QUESTION EVALUATION FOR YOUR PHONE SYSTEM

What About Your Phone System?
Today’s business environment is fast-paced and competitive. Technology makes it possible for you to know your customers and your customers to know your business within moments. You’re harnessing the power of all your tech resources, but what about your phone system?

If you’re not already considering how to get full value from your phone system, you should be.

Therefore, savvy business owners and their IT staff know that a cloud phone system can multiply success by integrating mobility, applications and collaboration under one valuable umbrella.
Can your current system do these things?
We’ve created an easy 10-question test to evaluate if your current phone provider is delivering the full potential of a modern phone system. Any items you can’t check off suggest you may not be harnessing the full power of a world-class cloud phone system.

Do you have a clear, secure connection without any voice delays, lag, or call quality issues?
Does your system provide business intelligence based on call data? Also, elegant integration with other important business applications (CRM, ERP, applicant tracking systems, etc.)?
Do users have direct access to a live person who can answer their questions and quickly solve their problems — without engaging you?
Are you confident that your phone system is secure and completely protected against hackers?  Both via the handset and the cloud data center?
Do you have access to intuitive, easy-to-use tools for phone routing and find-me/follow-me rules?
Does your provider leverage redundancy and failover to prevent against catastrophic phone system failure …

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Millennia Technologies is a full-service voice and data solutions company for midsize to enterprise customers. Specializing in UCaaS , CCaaS , Cybersecurity , IoT , Voice , Cloud , and more. Our passion is firmly rooted in showing clients how well-designed data solutions can significantly accelerate business operations, and then celebrating their goal-shattering successes.