Business VoIP Phones - VoIP Phone Systems - VoIP Telephone Systems

The demands for communications mobility within organisations are ever increasing - people increasingly want and need to be able to roam from their desk untethered. VoIP can truly facilitate that mobility.

They may want to be able to take a specific call to the office - and receive it on their mobile on the way to a meeting. Or they may be working from home but want to be able to make business calls, on their business budget, and whilst appearing to their clients to be in the office 'as normal'. And the technology has progressively evolved to achieve this - out of office, call transfer, voicemail etc. But in some respects oddly, given that voice has been around far longer then email, voice has struggled to keep up with the mobility of email. You now take it for granted that you get your email on your pc, and on your blackberry, iphone or other smart phone, and possibly at home via a VPN. And they all stay synchronised, it is one meshed system. But of course phone calls are real time, and typically routed over an analogue phone system at some point, and so this synchronisation is far more challenging.

So why is VoIP so different, and what does it achieve? VoIP is typically the running of voice over an IP intranet, within a company's site and increasingly between sites over SIP Trunks and other protocols. VoIP is also progressively making the jump to running over the internet, and whilst quality issues have limited the wholesale take-up of VoIP over the internet within business, Microsoft's recent announced acquisition of Skype is a pointer to the way that this field is developing.

But back to the humble intranet, what can a VoIP system do? The answer is really quite a lot. The latest generation of VoIP systems, for example ShoreTel VoIP and Cisco VoIP, both feature very sophisticated enhanced mobility. They offer a fully synchronised package that encompasses your desktop IP phone, a call manager system on your pc, potentially an App. on your blackberry or iphone, and potentially your laptop or home pc linked to the office by VPN. And they integrate with the corporate phone directory, CRM system and possibly other systems - so when a call comes in you can be notified at any of those points, or at all of them, you know who the call is from. On your pc your applications may push information relevant to the call directly to you. All of which means that to the customer you are more available, probably more informed, and to the company you are more valuable. If you are out of the office but want to make a call, you can trigger the office call manager to connect to your mobile, and then connect to the client, and potentially conference in other colleagues or hand the call off to someone else. So from the client's perspective you can indeed appear to have all the functionality of the office systems whilst at the same time achieving a high level of mobility.

There are many other benefits of VoIP systems, including potentially considerable cost savings. But mobility is probably the one that employees and clients alike will most appreciate, and VoIP systems now have the capability to facilitate email like mobility for voice calls.