Hi there.
Today I want to talk about one of the receptionist/executive assistant features of the Business Central: Workspace Monitoring.
Since my receptionist, James, wanted a big phone with lots of buttons, I got him the colour Polycom IP 670. It has a big screen, 6 line buttons and has support for up to 42 more buttons with expansion modules. At first I was concerned about having to configure the beast, but then I remembered that the Sutus does device detection and configuration automatically, so I gave it a shot.
Adding the phone was easy:
- Just plug the phone in, and it will boot up. The BC200 provides both power and networking through the Ethernet cable.
- Open Business Central Manager and go to the ‘Manage Phones’ tool. Your phones will appear listed by the current phone labels.
- Double-click the phone, and you’ll get to the ‘Configure Phone’ tab. From here I can assign the phone to James.
- Click on the ‘Phone Buttons’ tab and you can set up the number of call appearances, add speed dials, and assign keys to monitor other people to see if they are on the phone. This is where we’ll be doing our work today.
The Business Central 200 knows what each Polycom phone looks like, and features you can change are highlighted when you mouse over them. Click on ‘Configure Phone Buttons…’ and you’ll see the choices that are available for each line button. James needs to call the marketing staff many times a day, so a speed dial button will make his life easier. He also needs to know when staff are available to take calls. Enter Speed Dial and Workspace Monitoring.
This service offers one-touch calling to a local extension, and it also lets us know if any other phone in the workspace is in use. Because most of our calls are for the three people in marketing, it’s really helpful to be able to see who in that department is available to take calls. Just looking at the screen of the Model 670 shows the status of all their phones. If someone is in a meeting or away from their desk, then can hit the ‘do not disturb’ button. This makes them show to James as busy, so he knows that they’re not available at the moment.
With the Model 670, this is really simple. There are 6 assignable buttons, which allows for a lot of flexibility. I set it up like this:
The top two buttons are the two call appearances, the next three are for our marketing team – Vivian, Michiko, and Ryan – and the last button connects to Call Park and Unpark. Now James can see who is on the phone or available to take calls, and it also allows him to see if parked calls for other team members are being picked up in a timely manner.
Should we need more control in the future, the Model 670 also has the ability to work with up to 3 expansion modules. They are called sidecars, and each sidecar adds 14 configurable buttons with a display showing their function and status. Each button can be assigned independently of the others, just like those on the phone.
That’s it – it actually took longer to type this out than it took to configure the BC200!
