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.

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.

Sutus, Polycom and Megapath are hosting a partner-only seminar for those resellers interested in learning about each individual solution and how they seamlessly work together: Sutus Business Central for small business, Polycom handsets with HD and Megapath Duet SIP services.

Visit the Seminar invitation or register  for the  Sutus, Polycom, Megapath seminar now space is limited.