I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with beta testing recently, and I’m pretty excited about some new product that will really make customer management easier. Interested? Read on…

First things first. This application lives in your Windows toolbar and works with both your Outlook and your Polycom phone. There are also plans to have it integrate with some common database systems (CRMs), so you can log call numbers and times, customer support information, and case notes from your workers.

It makes all your dialing as simple as typing part of a person’s name. It’s actually just like having all of your contacts on speed dial! When you receive a call, your computer uses the CallerID number to find and display the Outlook contact information, so you will know exactly who it is. It can also flash up a window with the contact’s details when you receive a call, which will let your customer support workers greet each caller in a well-prepared fashion. It’s also only one click to call people back!

Also, it can interact, work, and integrate with Google Maps. If you enter contact info that is not in Outlook, you can perform a search without opening your browser. Once you choose the correct hit, you can call them with only one click. When you’re done, you can create a new Outlook contact, including a clickable link to Google Maps, which will autofill to save time and effort.

The plan is to make this available upon request within the next month. Just email the Sutus sales team and they’ll contact you when it goes live!

-Dave.

I thought I’d save some trouble for you out there in blog-land, and tell you about an easy fix we came across this weekend. I was out of the office, and our new IT guy wanted to set up a spare phone in the lunchroom. However, he wasn’t totally sure about how to do it, and didn’t want to do it wrong. So, he called me and woke me up.

I wasn’t totally sure about the process either, and he didn’t really think it was important enough to call Sutus Support about. After some deliberation, he decided to check out the help files. I know it sounds surprising, especially for a technology company, but the help files actually helped him figure out what to do!

If that wasn’t enough, while he was using the BC200′s web Administrator interface, he also clicked on a few of the “Learn More…” links to find out some more technical details. We got in to the ‘Help’ menu (in the top right corner of the Administration screen) and found the tutorials. There are quite a lot of them!

We also learned that we could rightclick on an area of the screen to get help on that topic. It turned out that the System Administrator Guides have screenshots, and some of them are available in PDF format. We printed out the Receptionist Guide, just to have it on hand.

In conclusion, RTFM. That’s “Read the Fantastic Manual!” Oh – and to set up a new phone, all you have to do is plug it in to the BC200. It will automatically connect and be functional, and then you can assign it to a person or workgroup later.

-Dave.

Today we’ve got a simple way to save both time and money, all while keeping your data backed up in one convenient place.

Getting some kind of standard method to back up files was always on our list of ‘to do’ items here at the office, but it never seemed to be important enough to get done. Some people would burn their data to a DVD, some would copy it to a USB stick, and some just wouldn’t back up at all. Using the BC200 as a central backup makes sense for all involved. It’s a simple 4-step process to back up your My Documents folder in Windows 7 and Windows XP, so let’s get started!
Windows XP:

1. Click on “Start,” then “Accessories,” then “System Tools,” and then “Backup.” You will come to a screen like this:

2. Click “Next.” Make sure you select “My documents and settings,” otherwise your backed up files will fill the BC200 too quickly. Click ‘Next.’

3. On this screen, you can tell your computer where to save the backup file. On ours, we already set up a mapped drive to the BC200 on the Y: drive.  (The full path to the backup files is \\central\workspaces\personal\kyle perry\Backup, just in case we need to find it.)

4. Click on “Next,” and then “Finish,” and you’re done!

Windows 7:

1. Click “Start,” and open “Backup.” You will get the following screen. If you haven’t set a backup before, you’ll need to click on “Set Backup” to continue.

2. To tell the computer to save your backup to the BC200, click on “Save on a network.”

3. To tell the computer exactly where you want the files on the BC200, fill in the location. This one here is just an example – you’ll need to replace “workspaces” and “name” with the name of your workspace and person. Also, you’ll need to enter your username and password on the BC200. Click ‘OK’ to go to the next window.

4. You should select “Let Windows choose.” Click “Next” and then “Finish” on the next screen and you’re done!

Your computer will back itself up to your BC200, keeping a copy of the files in your “My Documents” folder.

That’s it for today. I hope you never need to use the backups, but if you do, you’ll be happy you took the time to set this up. (Just a quick technical note – the BC200 has two separate hard drives inside in a RAID configuration. If one of them fails, you’ll still be be able to recover your data from the other drive.) Happy computing!

-Dave.

So, how does this work? All you’ll need are two or more offices with an Internet connection and a BC200 at each location. Setting it up is pretty easy – the BC200′s wizard walks you through it.

Our screenshot below shows that our home office is San Francisco. We’re directly connected to the BC200s in Vancouver, Chicago, and Boston, and we have a local telephone line available too. Via Boston, we can also reach Toronto and New York.

This allows for flexibility in call routing too. With this example, we could allow anyone from any office to place a call to the 604 or 778 area codes, regardless of their physical location. Conversely, a customer in San Francisco can call our 778 number and be seamlessly forwarded to our corporate main offices in Toronto, all with no long distance charges. And the San Francisco office doesn’t even need to be open!

Imagine this scenario: Customer Jane, in Boston, wants to talk to the Sutus sales team, but it’s 7:30pm, and her local office is closed. In the past, she’d have to do several steps.

1. find out where other Sutus offices are located
2. figure out the time difference
3. find their phone numbers, and
4. pay for the long distance call.

With Interoffice Calling and an optimized call flow, however, she just has one step:

1. call her local office.

Their BC200 takes care of the rest.
Her call will be forwarded to Vancouver where they are still open and able to take care of her. No research, time calculations or phone charges needed.

Customers saving their money is great, but we at the office like saving too. Especially the finance department! Imagine that I’m in New York, and I need to call our importer in Toronto. I could call long distance, but that’s going to become expensive. Instead, I can use the Toronto phone line. My BC200 routes my call to Toronto, where their BC200 sends it out to the phone network. Success!

Send us a line if you have any questions – our new website has all our contact details. If you’re already a reseller, click here. If you’re an end user who is interested in the Business Central solution, click here.

That’s it for this week. Talk to you soon!

-Dave.

Here’s a screenshot with some common examples:

• Win is a pretty important guy. When someone calls his number, the BC200 will ring every phone in the company. If he doesn’t pick up, it will then try him on his cell.
• The Development group doesn’t take calls, so their incoming calls just terminate at their voicemail box.
• Sales and Marketing has two members, and they’re interchangeable in terms of clients. A call for them will ring all the phones in the group, and then go to their voicemail.
• Stephanie‘s calls mostly come from overseas, from people who are in very different time zones, so we’ve set her number to go straight to voicemail. She’ll return the calls when she comes to work.
• Andrew Watson is the only member of the Development group, but he doesn’t want to stop working for every call the Development group gets. He’ll get calls for his extension, and if he doesn’t answer, it gets sent to the Development voicemail.
• My Group and Test One go straight to voicemail, because they’re for testing new configurations and for temporary uses.
• Gabe North has three destinations in his call flow. The BC200 will ring his phone, and then expand to the Reception phones, and then go to voicemail. This lets people contact him in both of the parts of the office where he works.
• The Reception group rings all the Reception phones, and then goes to the Auto-Attendant.

Now, using the “Distinctive Ringtones” and “Send Office Voicemail Notifications to your Cell Phone” entries from a few posts ago, we can customize these flows even more, all in a simple fashion. I hope this gives you some ideas about how to improve your call flow efficiently.
-Dave.

Some of the crew in Sutus Support mentioned that asking about integrating a Free/Busy calendar from Outlook was a popular topic, so I decided to do some research. There’s a good article in the Help files, but why go there when you are already here?

First of all, a free/busy calendar is not just a calendar for one person. It is a calendar that combines many schedules and displays them on one page. This really saves time when you are booking appointments or scheduling team meetings, to name but two examples. Essentially, when a person publishes their Outlook calendar to the Business Central, that schedule information becomes available to other employees.

Enough of the talk, Dave. How do we do this? Well, if you’ve used the BC200′s Install Wizard, your Outlook calendar is already ready to use. If you haven’t, or you have recently upgraded your systems, or you just want to know what’s happening under the hood, read on.

These instructions may not be exact if you’re using a different version of Outlook. Here is what to do if you’re using Outlook 2003. (This is all in the BC200 Help files, if you get stuck.)

1. In Microsoft Outlook, select the Tools menu, and then go to Options.
2. Click on the Calendar Options button, and then click the Free/Busy Options button.
3. Check the Publish at My Location checkbox, and then put http://central.YOURDOMAIN:8080/freebusy/daveco.vfb into the Publish at My Location text box. Be sure that you have entered it exactly as in the example! Now replace “daveco” with your Business Central logon name, and “YOURDOMAIN” with your domain name.
4. Fill in the Search location text box exactly as follows: http://central.YOURDOMAIN:8080/freebusy/%NAME%.vfb This time, don’t change YOURDOMAIN or %NAME%, though.

Now, your Outlook calendar appointments will be visible to other people when they are scheduling appointments in their Outlook. Be careful, though – the Business Central does not support calendar sharing, which is when you can see other people’s calendar information in your own calendar.

It’s hard to be excited about a calendar, I know, but it’s simple to see how this can increase efficiency around the office. I’ll write again next week, as I see that I’m free at 4:30…

-Dave.

Something new this week! Sutus has released their newest software update (version 1.7.1 available upon request starting today), and I heard about a few new features that seem promising. I’ll be sending out some articles on these over the next while, but today I’m going to introduce Distinctive Ringtones.

I can hear the groans already. “But we can already choose the ringtones on our phones! Why is this news?” Actually, this is much better than just selecting a distinctive ring for your own phone. It’s more like audible CallerID – any call for a specific workspace will ring with the same ringtone, regardless of which physical phone it is.

It’s simple to use. Let’s go into Business Central Manager and get to work. Once you’ve entered your password, click on the “Manage Workspaces,” then highlight the name of the workspace to modify, click on “Edit Properties,” then “Phone Service,” and lastly “Incoming Call Flow.” You can select the ringtone under the “Ring Type” dropdown menu. The default is to use the ring type selected on the phone, but this can override that selection. Also, I can change my own settings as well as the settings for groups that I’m in.

This works in tandem with the Call Flow feature to ‘announce’ the destination of a call, whether it is for a specific person or a specific department. Sometimes a caller wants to speak to Jill, and sometimes they want to speak to someone in Support. We can ring the same physical phone with a different tone for each of these situations.

Imagine a room used for planning and design. There might be 5 or 6 phones in the room, and lets say that they are in the call flows for personal workspaces as well as shared ones. When a phone rings, everyone needs to check to see if it is their phone, and they also need to see if it is a call that concerns them. Running back and forth to check the call display can really disrupt the creativity of this team! However, if there is a different ring for each of the people or teams present, those not concerned with the call can just ignore it.

As you can see, this makes it pretty easy to find out who the call is for when you are close to, but not looking at, the phone. I should warn you, though, that this only works with Polycom phones, not the Handy-Tone or softphones.

This is available as a limited release, so if you’re interested, just drop a line to the Sutus Support team at support@sutus.com

-Dave.

I want my customers to get a hold of my people easily. Isn’t it frustrating to have to remember two or three business phone numbers just to talk to one person? Get a competitive edge and make your people easy to contact by optimizing your Call Flow.

Case 1 – The Mobile Employee

Jim, our service tech, usually works offsite, but in town. He starts and ends his day at the office, so he needs to be contactable, but he doesn’t want to give out his cell numbers to clients. When somebody calls Jim’s extension, the BC200 will ring his desk phone first, in case he is in the office, and then forward the call to his cell phone using an external line.

Case 2 – He’s Overseas

Daniel, our traveling sales agent, is often out of the country, and he’d like to have an ‘office phone’ while overseas. Calling his extension here will ring his desk phone and his softphone (communications software that acts like a telephone) at the same time. If he doesn’t answer, the caller will be directed to the Auto-Attendant. The caller will think he is in the office down the street, but he’ll really be in Germany, connected to our BC200 with a VPN! As a bonus, the VPN allows him secure access to his email, the internet connection in the office, shared documents, and even the office printer.

Case 3 – Her desk is here, but she works over there…

Renata is a designer, but she spends a lot of time collaborating with Jean in the production department. She needs to be available wherever she is. Here, the BC200 will direct the incoming call to Renata’s desk phone, then ring Jean’s phone in the engineering department, and then terminate the call back at Renata’s voicemail.

Case 4 – Like a Pager

Dr. Beesie doesn’t want to take non-emergency calls while in the clinic, but she wants to get messages. In this case, the BC200 doesn’t ring a phone – it just terminates the call at her voicemail. The good doctor can then return her calls as time permits. (Using the last tip, we could forward the notification emails to her cell phone… just to give you a few ideas!)

Case 5 – Anyone Will Do

Our tech support department has many workers – Bill, Steve, and Eric, to name just three – and they can all help our clients. Someone calling Bill will ring his desk phone, then to all the phones in the Tech Support shared workspace, and then to the voicemail for the tech support shared workspace.

Set It Up.

Here’s how to do it. Call flows are editable under the Edit Workspace tab – just double click the workspace name, select Phone Service, and choose Incoming Call Flow. We can have up to three sequential destinations for an incoming call. Each destination can be a physical phone, a softphone, a forwarding number, a voice mailbox, or the Auto-Attendant. Just start at the top of the page and work down, and that’s the order the BC200 will follow when it receives a call.

So, what’s the secret? There really isn’t one. We need to remember that the BC200 frees us from the old idea that ‘each phone has one extension number, and that’s that.’ Just give your clients one extension, and let the BC200 and your Call Flow keep you in touch wherever you are! Have any questions? Just call me at the office, and I’ll be there… or will I?

-Dave.

Wouldn’t it be convenient to get a text message whenever a voice mail was left for you at work?

One of our sales guys was out of the office but on the phone a lot, and he couldn’t get his email notifications of voice messages at the office. Normally he would just check his email on a smartphone, but he doesn’t have a data package! Here’s a way around that situation.

Your BC200 emails you whenever you get a voicemail – mine goes to my Gmail account. I set up a filter that says “If the subject contains ‘voicemail,’ forward it to ‘myphonenumber@mycellcarrier.com.’ It’s pretty simple – here’s the whole process:

1. Someone leaves a voicemail on the BC200.
2. The BC200 emails my Gmail account, saying I have a voicemail.
3. Gmail forwards that email to my cellphone carrier.
4. My cellphone carrier sends an SMS message to my phone.

Data packages cost money, but most cell companies offer free incoming SMS messages.

I hope this little tip helps you make the most of your BC200. Until next time,

- Dave.

There have been some stories recently about power outages and brownouts affecting local businesses, and I go to thinking about the importance of keeping communications up and available. Of course, we have a UPS on each of our servers and essential desktops, but we hadn’t protected our phone system. One brainstorming session later and we have the fix.

I went down to the local tech shop and bought another UPS. The higher the capacity of the UPS, the longer we can keep our communications up for. This is for the Business Central 200 and our internet gateway. I found out recently that most Polycom phones can be powered by the BC200 over their Ethernet cable. If I just don’t plug in the phone’s power adapter, it will automatically switch to receiving power over Ethernet (PoE). Now our UPS will keep our gateway, BC200, and phones up in an outage.

All Polycom phones made in the last two years are compatible with PoE. Some older models will be as well, but there’s no easy way to tell by looking at them. Just leave the phone connected to the BC200, disconnect the power adapter and see if it remains on. Most Polycom phones are cheaper to buy without the power adapter, too.

Using PoE while connecting your gateway and BC200 to a dedicated UPS will keep your communications up during a power outage. That’s it for this topic, so I’m going to go and take some unneeded wall power adapters to the recyclers.

-Dave.