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.

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.

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.

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.

I was speaking with the Sutus support team, and they mentioned that there is sometimes confusion about what the default Reception workspace is for, why it is included, and how it can be used effectively.

The Reception workspace, for the most part, is like all other shared workspaces: it allows its members to share access to files, emails and phone calls. Also, all members of Reception can configure the behavior of that shared workspace; what happens when someone calls (the incoming call flow) or when someone emails reception (email forwards/alias). Reception has two other benefits that normal shared workspaces do not have:

1. It is the default destination for all external incoming calls.
2. Its members have the added ability to record the Auto-Attendant greeting.

Now that we have an idea of why and how the Reception shared workspace is used by the company, we should look at how shared workspaces help administrators manage their system. The first and foremost benefit is that it allows for role-based configuration. For most companies, it does not matter which employee is currently acting as the receptionist. Calls and emails will normally be handled in the same way by all receptionists.

Imagine, for example, that your receptionist, Bob, is leaving the company and will be replaced by a new employee, whom we will call Jill. By using the Reception shared workspace to handle the role of the receptionist, all you will need to do is:

1. delete Bob’s workspace, because he has left the company,
2. create a new personal workspace for Jill, and
3. add Jill to the Reception shared workspace.

However, if the Reception shared workspace was not being used, the administrator would need to:

1. create a new personal workspace for Jill,
2. write down Bob’s configuration, including call flow, email settings, and the like,
3. forward all of Bob’s non-personal email to Jill,
4. copy all of Bob’s non-personal files to Jill,
5. forward all of Bob’s non-personal voice mails to Jill,
6. delete Bob’s workspace,
7. edit Jill’s workspace configuration to be the same as Bob’s,
8. edit the callflow of all GW310 line’s to use Jill’s callflow, and
9. edit the callflow of your VoIP provider to use Jill’s callflow.

Ouch. That is a lot of work.

In the second example, the role of reception was attached to a personal workspace. Moving this role to a new personal workspace requires a lot of customized configuration. In the first example, the role of the reception is attached to a shared workspace. This means that just the members change, not the workspace configuration! Jill will automatically have access to all of the reception email, files and phone calls that Bob had received during his time as the receptionist.

Using a shared workspace to manage roles applies to other positions in your office such as support, sales or accounting. By creating shared workspaces to handle each role, employees (personal workspaces) can move between roles and even share multiple roles.

The other benefit for installers is that all incoming calls go to a known place by default. This means that there is no configuration required if a new GW310 PSTN gateway or VoIP provider is added to the system. This is because the default behavior is to direct all of the phone lines to Reception’s incoming call flow. This makes new equipment installation easier and faster by reducing the number of configuration steps required.

That’s pretty much it for this week. Shared workspaces, in particular the Reception shared workspace, are pretty powerful tools. They can simplify the administration and day to day usage of your Business Central.

-Dave.

I’ve been having some thoughts recently about email, company image, and shared workspaces. Have you ever been emailing a company about several unrelated topics, only to notice that your inquiries to sales@company.com, finance@company.com, and development@company.com are all replied to by fred@company.com? Fred sure does wear a lot of hats at this business! And how can we classify his responses at a glance in they all come from the same address? Worst of all, what happens when Fred goes on holiday?

When we call a support line for a new widget manufacturer, we don’t care who talks to us. Any support worker will be able to solve our problem. However, we could just as easily call a specific extension and talk to a specific person. We can do the same with email – to reach a general group, we have distribution lists, forwarding to groups, and the like, while personal email addresses are nothing new – but those are clumsy and inefficient. Wouldn’t it be ideal for replies to a group to come from a consistent email address, and wouldn’t it be even better for an inbox to be accessible by all the members of a team? This is a collaborative workspace, where the whole team can function as a well-oiled machine.

So here’s how to set up a Support group. Create a shared workspace on your BC200, enable email service, such as support@example.com, and add each member to it. Then go to each team member’s computer and configure their email client to subscribe to the Support shared inbox. Now, when a message is received, it is readable by all members of that shared workspace. This isn’t the same as sending a copy to each person, so if one person handles the message those changes are visible to ”’all”’ members of the workspace.

To make it appear as as if we are sending email as Support, we must create a “Support Identity” on our email client that sends messages as support@example.com. All major email clients (Outlook, Mail, Thunderbird) have this capability, but here’s how to set it up with Sutus Webmail. (If you don’t have it, go here to sign up. Sutus Webmail )

1. Log on to Webmail, and click on ‘Personal Settings.’

2. Click the’ Identities’ tab, and click the ‘New Identity’ button.

3. Enter your display name (Widget Co. Support for our example,) and the email address (support@example.com).

4. Now, when sending email, you have the choice to send as either yourself or your group.

This keeps privacy for the team members by not forcing them to use a personal address for all company business, allows for team members to go on holiday without letting the customers know, and allows for the team’s size to vary in response to workload all while keeping continuity for the customers.

As well as allowing for team members to work together more efficiently, this makes it really simple for us to control another part of our company image. Of course, our company wants to be seen as organized, well-run, and coordinated, and keeping areas of specialization clearly delineated provides our customers with clear evidence that we are.

-Dave.

I called Sutus Support and asked about improving call quality. At their suggestion, I looked into the Internet Connection Settings of the Business Central 200, and found the section on Internet Rate Control Settings.Internet Rate Control (also called Traffic Shaping or Quality of Service) allows us to prioritize our internet traffic for VoIP. The BC200 has all we need built in, including a connection speed tester. Let’s go into Administration and see what’s there.

After entering your login and password, click on the ‘Internet Settings’ tool and then the ‘Internet Rate Control Settings’ tab. There should be a red X showing that rate control is off. Click on the ‘Change Rate Control Settings’ button, and then click the ‘On’ radio button. It’s easier to measure the upload and download speeds automatically, but you can enter values manually if you know the numbers for your internet connection. Ideally, and for the most accurate results, measurement should happen when there is no other internet traffic. After hours is probably best, and don’t forget to quit your email and instant messaging programs before starting! Click ‘OK’ so the BC200 can carry out a speed test and configure itself internally.

After the speed test has completed, the BC200 will display the measured speeds. Most DSL and cable connections are asynchronous (greater speeds downloading,) while T1s and are synchronous (equal speeds for downloading and uploading.) Try the test several times at different times of the day, and enter the greatest numbers. Your ISP can tell you the speeds for your connection as well. Click the ‘OK’ box, and you’re done.

Something interesting that I found out from the support staff is that Sutus has done some extra work with their implementation of traffic shaping. Most others just control the outgoing traffic, but the BC200 controls both ingoing and outgoing. This helps ensure that all participants in your VoIP conversation can hear and be heard clearly. The BC200 allots a portion of your connection to VoIP traffic and reserves it for the duration of the phone call. It’s dynamic, too – if another call is made, the BC200 will reserve its traffic as well.

I was a bit worried that this feature would affect my downloading speeds all the time, not just when I’m on the phone. It turns out, though, that traffic shaping only takes effect when a VoIP connection is made. The downloading speeds seem as fast as they were before!

So there you have it. Greater call quality for your business and your callers without sacrificing download speed, all with a few clicks.

-Dave.

Commonly found in retail environments as well as those with an outdoor area, overhead paging offers the ability to make a public announcement over a speaker by using the phone on your desk. Think of situations like grocery stores or markets that need to call out for an additional teller to be added from somewhere in the back, or a car dealership or a lumberyard where they need to let someone outside know that there is a call waiting for them inside; they all need overhead paging systems.

Business Central has a couple of ways to deliver overhead paging, both of them a snap to setup. If you need a quick and easy paging system, simply find a pair of regular old amplified speakers that you would normally use with your computer and plug them in to the audio out port on your Business Central 200.

Once they’re plugged in, dial ‘**’ from any Polycom phone and enjoy the sweet sound of your first paging message!

For a more robust and flexible paging system, plug just about any analog overhead paging system into the audio out port and the same dialing ‘**’ from any phone will trigger the overhead paging – does it get any easier?

You will need a 3.5mm stereo or mono audio cable to make this work and each paging system is different and will require its own specific configuration, but getting it to work with the ‘audio-out’ port on the BC200 will not be a challenge.

Let us know if you are using overhead paging and how it is working for you!