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Whether you have a single site, or want to extend these IP-based
solutions to branch offices, Preferred Technology Solutions can
meet your needs by designing and implementing a converged network
solution designed specifically for your company or organization.
As a leading Texas based solutions provider, Preferred Technology
Solutions will provide you with a customized, secure and reliable
solution that is integrated, intelligent, standards-based, and able
to adapt quickly to your changing environment.
If traditional, circuit-switched telephone systems are no longer
adequate to keep up with your company's communications needs, or
your existing network infrastructure is not adequate to fit your
needs, it may be time for you to consider convergence.
As you sift through a wide variety of vendors and products, doing
your research can be daunting and time-consuming. What you need
is a trustworthy, proven company that will back its technology with
service, support, and training.
We have the technical expertise and the business savvy to help
you determine exactly what you need now and what you will need as
you grow. We'll take you from design through deployment. Whether
you want to move towards a converged infrastructure all at once,
or phase it in gradually, Preferred Technology Solutions can ensure
a smooth transition to truly future-ready communications, with maximum
ROI.
VoIP Advantages
How Does Networked Telephony Improve Business Communications?
In many ways. By integrating your voice and data communications,
you get the powerful capabilities of the most sophisticated phone
systems, and then some, without the cost and complexity.
- Easy moves, adds & changes. In a tremendous
boon for small businesses, networked telephony systems allow you
to move, add and change phones easily and in minutes. Since the
handsets are network devices like your computers or printers,
you simply plug them into standard Ethernet jacks anywhere on
your network. You eliminate the cost and time required to schedule
a service technician every time you want to add or move a telephone.
- Multiple auto attendants. Networked telephony
solutions feature multiple auto attendants, allowing you to determine
how calls are routed through your organization. You can assign
an auto attendant for the entire company and for each division,
workgroup or individual. You even can use different auto attendants
for various times of the day, such as business hours, non-business
hours and lunch. As a result, you can organize call patterns to
your exact needs, ensuring customers, clients and vendors access
their parties for optimal business communications.
- Call Detail Reporting (CDR). CDR enables you
to track phone usage within the organization, including who makes
calls, to where, when and for how long. You also can assign account
codes to individual customers or clients to precisely track how
much time you spend on the phone with them. As a result, you can
bill clients more accurately and easily and improve time management
within the company.
- Reliability. Select a networked telephony
system that works independently of network operating systems.
This ensures that your solution will continue to deliver high-quality
voice communications even if the rest of your network crashes.
If your business depends on constant incoming calls from customers
or vendors, there are more advanced network telephony systems available.
The following are some of the capabilities these systems offer.
- Unified Messaging. Traditionally, you segregate
your e-mail and voice messages into two separate systems. With
an advanced networked telephony solution, you can combine both
into a single e-mail application such as Microsoft Outlook Express.
This way, all messages are available in one location, ensuring
more convenient and efficient communications. Simply click on
a voice mail and your computer plays it back. You can listen to
your most important voice messages first and save and organize
your voice mail in folders as you do with your e-mail. You even
can forward your voice mail as e-mail attachments to other users.
- Computer/telephony integration (CTI). Advanced
networked telephony systems enable small businesses to deploy
powerful call-center capabilities that once only large corporations
could afford to deploy and operate. By integrating your voice
communications and data, a network telephony system can display
the records of customers or vendors on your computer automatically
and nearly instantly whenever they call. As a result, you greatly
improve the response times and accuracy of business-critical departments
like sales, customer service or technical support. Even create
call hunt groups, ensuring calls are forwarded to the next available
agents.
- Use your computer as a telephone. With advanced
networked telephony, the integration of your voice communications
with your Ethernet network is so seamless that you can deploy
desktop computers as handsets. When using optional software and
headsets, employees can dial their phones from their screens and
have all the functionality of a standard telephone. This is especially
useful for users in transaction-intensive departments that serve
as call centers. As a result, your company can leverage its computers,
eliminating the costs of additional handsets, and employees can
reduce the clutter on their desktops.
- Control and customize telephones without technical
expertise. If your networked telephony solution ships
with an administration utility, a simple-to-use program that you
access with any standard Web browser from any computer on the
network, you can easily and completely customize your phones to
your exact business requirements. In fact, you control your entire
phone system. For example, limit any phone to certain area codes
at certain times of the day. Or arrange for the phone to ring
at the next available agent in your customer-service department.
Additionally, employees can access the utility to tailor phones
to their own needs. They can customize the programmable buttons
on their telephones for speed dials, forward their calls to other
phones, and set-up off-site notification to be notified via phone
or pager of new voice-mail messages.
- Access messages from home. Advanced networked
telephony solutions enable you and your employees to access voice-mail
from home. Simply dial into the messaging system from an off-site
location, enter your password and access your messages. You also
can take full advantage of all of the system’s capabilities
from remote locations, such as voice conferencing, just as if
you were at the office. As far as callers can tell, you are at
the office. As a result, your telecommuters and branch offices
rem-ain part of your main office’s telephone system.
- The extras come at no extra cost. With the
exception of the software and headsets needed to use your computers
as telephones, all of these advanced business features are standard
on advanced networked telephony solutions.
For more information on how Preferred Technology Solutions can
tailor an IP telephony solution for you, contact
us.
VoIP Q&A
| Q.
What is 3Com’s background in VoIP? |
| A. 3com has installed more
than 15,000 NBX systems and in excess on 1 million telephones.
Our larger system, the VCX is designed to scale to 50,000
lines and beyond, and is based upon proven technology used
to provide call routing in some of the worlds largest carriers. |
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to Index |
| Q.
Does this system depend on the Internet? Is it a service? |
A. No. The NBX Converged
System is a self contained turn key system that does not
rely on Internet connectivity. But the system can leverage
Internet connectivity if available, by connecting remote
sites and users within the performance constraints of the
Internet service. |
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| Q.
My experiments with other IP based communications solutions
have concluded that voice quality is poor; is the voice quality
of your system similar to my existing telephone system? |
| A. Yes. A 3Com converged
VoIP system automatically configures both privacy and quality
of service necessary to ensure voice quality consistent with
traditional phone service. This has been proven by independent
studies carried out by MierCom Labs published in Business
Communications Review (2/03). |
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to Index |
| Q.
Will VoIP add complexity for my users? |
| A. No. Using the system will
be the same as any other phone system, however users will
gain other benefits such as fully integrated voicemail. Users
can leverage advanced capabilities such as automatic call
routing and even integrate voice messaging with email and
dial from their PC’s contact directories. |
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to Index |
| Q.
How does greater functionality add value? |
| A. By increasing call handling
options like auto-attendant, incoming callers are more likely
to get correctly routed. Call Detail Records provide historical
information enabling further customization and tuning of the
system. A number of additional applications can be added to
the system to add call center functionality and further integrate
computer applications with voice communications to better
serve callers |
| » Back
to Index |
| Q.
What if my network goes down, will I loose voice service? |
| A. Converging the Voice and
Data network presents the opportunity to add UPS power to
the data network, ultimately increasing the overall reliability
of communications. When the phones are powered using 3com
Power-over-Ethernet switches, the UPS will ensure that the
network and telephony system will continue to operate. |
| » Back
to Index |
| Q. What is Convergence? |
| A. Many companies maintain
two separate cabling and hardware infrastructures at their
facilities: Their telephone system, and their LAN. Convergence
is the melding of these two separate infrastructures and technologies
into one homogeneous network. This enables your telephones
and computers to share the same common networking hardware. |
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| Q. What
are the benefits of convergence? |
A. There are numerous
benefits to converging your voice and data infrastructures.
These include:
- A converged infrastructure results in a well designed
and scalable data network, therefore yielding improvements
in communications reliability for both voice and networking
applications.
- Convergence typically allows your existing IT staff
to maintain both the computer network and the telephone
system. This reduces response times for typical maintenance
operations such as adding, moving, or changing telephone
programming.
- When multiple sites are connected, they all share a
common platform.
- Implementing a converged infrastructure will allow
more efficient use of your telephone system by your users,
which will lead to increased productivity.
- In a converged network, both the computer and the phone
share the same Ethernet cable by utilizing the built-in
2 port switch in the phone. When wiring for a new station
or an entire new facility, there is typically a 30-50%
reduction in wiring costs.
- Remote locations and users can be linked together using
a converged network, which can result in savings on long
distance charges and reduce telecommunications and networking
costs overall.
|
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to Index |
| Q. I have
an existing LAN. Do I have to upgrade it to converge my infrastructure? |
| A. Not necessarily. Preferred
Computers Systems offers a Voice Readiness Assessment. This
allows us to pre-qualify your network for VoIP suitability.
Recommendations will be made off of this reports. |
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