Posts Tagged 'Sutus Business Central'

Phone System Reliability – PoE and UPS

Published October 29, 2009 3rd party products , Feature Highlights 2 Comments
Tags: ,

Hi,

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.


Workspace Monitor

Published September 9, 2009 Feature Highlights Leave a Comment
Tags: , , , , ,

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:

configThe 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. 

sidecar
That’s it – it actually took longer to type this out than it took to configure the BC200!

Call Parking Saves Time

Published August 26, 2009 Feature Highlights Leave a Comment
Tags: , ,

Talking with receptionists can give a lot of information about how to configure a Business Central 200 for optimum usage. Something that I found to be quite flexible is the Call Park and Retrieve feature. There are two main reasons to use call parking, also called system hold, instead of local hold.

Call Park

When a customer calls the office, the receptionist greets them and asks who they’d like to speak to. They then put the customer on local hold, notify the intended recipient, and connect the call to the recipient. This is the traditional method, and as you can see, it’s quite labour-intensive. It requires the recipient to be at their normal telephone extension and available for the call, it requires the receptionist to shepherd the call through various phone numbers, and only the receptionist can connect the call to the recipient. Local hold can only be cancelled by the phone that initiated it!

However, Sutus has simplified this procedure with their implementation of call parking. The receptionist can park the call while they page the recipient. The recipient can then unpark the call from any convenient phone. They recipient can be near any phone in the company, and the receptionist doesn’t need to make the connection. Paging is easy, too: “Accounting, call in stall one, please!”

There’s another common scenario that really makes call park stand out. Imagine that you’re at your desk when you receive a call. Perhaps this call is private, or involves personal information. You don’t want to have this conversation where your colleagues can listen in, so you move to a private conference room. Park the call and find an empty conference room. Unpark the call when you arrive, and have your conversation in peace. Imagine the past – put the call on hold, find an empty conference room, go back to your desk and transfer the call, run to the conference room and take the call. Two trips to the conference room, plus a longer time on hold for the caller – the Business Central helps us with a win-win solution.

In addition, when the receptionist puts people on hold, there’s no way of seeing a list of the callers, which receptionist put them on hold, or their destinations. With the Call Park feature, any Polycom IP phone can display the list of parked calls, with their source number, destination number, and who the call was parked by as well.

Call Parking is a simple feature, to be sure, but it has strong advantages over the way putting calls on hold used to be done. Efficient, convenient, and effective.

- Dave.

Video – Sutus Business Central ease of use

Published January 28, 2009 Videos 2 Comments
Tags: , , ,

We shot a quick video of Business Central that focuses on how easy it is for a small business or their service provider to setup and configure the basic features.

It starts with unpacking the boxes, plugging in the cables, and running through parts of the setup wizard. We also highlight our Polycom phone setup interface (which is in the new software – version 1.6.3 – that is due to be released in a couple weeks!) that we think is a first of its kind, how to change call flow and redirect incoming calls to external numbers.

Sutus Business Central,

Sutus Business Central,

This movie requires Adobe Flash for playback.

This is the first of many videos so keep an eye out for more!

Jon Paul Janze
Director, Product Management and Marketing