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There are a number of analog office devices that can adapt to a hosted VoIP platform.  How successfully this is done is largely dependent upon the hosted VoIP provider.  The optimum solution is a localized deployment of quality of service programming and an analog adapter, which converts the analog signal to digital for transmission over the internet.

There are several examples of analog devices or applications that can be incorporated over a hosted VoIP platform.  Fax machines are the most common, but many businesses also need an analog connection for postage machines, security and fire alarms, cordless phones, and other connections to companies who monitor or interface with devices at the business location. 

Many VoIP providers do not provide this interface for fax machines, preferring that their customers adapt to a fully electronic fax platform.  However, some have incorporated the faxing protocol to allow for the utilization of fax machines in the process. 

Quality of Service a Must – When running voice and data over the same internet connection, many VoIP providers will address call quality by having the customer secure more bandwidth.  Not only is this not always necessary, it is not the most effective approach.  Whether resident on a router or an edge device, it is recommended that specific QoS programming be in place to prioritize voice packets over data.  Where voice quality is very apparent to the end user when it is bad, analog devices simply won’t work well or at all if they don’t receive the highest preference over the internet connection.

Conversion Hardware – There are many devices over many manufacturers that can be used for the conversion between analog and data signals.  sipVine, a national hosted VoIP provider, has had great success using the Linksys 2102 model when compared to other models.  Not only is this adapter very stable, it allows for the adjusting of settings to address particular sensitivities of the analog device or signal. 

Research the capabilities of your potential VoIP provider when it comes to the various analog requirements of your business.  This is definitely a source of differentiation when searching for the best business VoIP provider.  You will find plenty that have such capabilities and utilize a variety of adapters, but it will be rare to find one who excels at QoS. 

About the author:  Mark Greim is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at sipVine, a provider of a variety of digital phone solutions and services. Mark has extensive experience working for start-up or entrepreneurial organizations and a passion for affordable, reliable, and purposeful technology solutions in those environments. 

The Cisco SPA525G VoIP phone is the top end phone in the Cisco small business series.  The series is commonly used by Hosted VoIP companies in their phone selections.  Consistent with the entire line up of phones, the SPA525 model is very user friendly from both the system administrator and the end user standpoint. Being a top end phone, you would expect some nice additional features for the approximately $100 in additional cost.

The Great:

• This phone has a very crisp color screen.  You can upload a picture or company logo to the screen’s background for a nice personalized touch.  The screen is larger than the other, monochrome backlit phones in the series.
• With the SPA525, you can connect a blue tooth headset to use as a wireless option.  This is a more elegant approach for a cordless headset for these models of phones.  The other phones in the line up only provide for a corded headset to work with the headset control on the phone.  If you were to attach a cordless headset to the other phones, you have to loop it with the handset and apply a lifter to the phone.  So, the blue tooth option is awesome with the SPA525.

The Good:

• The SPA525 is also WiFi capable, thus a corded Ethernet connection is not necessary for this phone.  Although the phone’s performance will be subject to the WiFi strength, potential interference, and access point capacity, it does offer a good alternative to Ethernet wiring to current unwired workstations. 
• A very cool feature of the SPA525 is that it can record calls on-demand to a jump drive that can be plugged into the USB port on the phone.  You can listen to the calls after recording or safe the files to your computer from the jump drive.  The only reason why this isn’t a “great” feature is that it may be duplicative to the recording service many hosted VoIP providers already provide.  However, if your hosted VoIP provider charges extra for recordings, this will allow you to take control of the recording yourself and eliminate the extra charge.

The Not So Good:

• This phone has 5 lines, which is an upgrade from the 4 line base model, SPA504, but less than the 8 line SPA508.  In my mind, with the bigger screen, they could have easily made this a ten line phone.  Some hosted providers can program the lines to be speed dials to other users and set it so you can see when they are currently on the phone.  You only need two to three “lines” for Direct Dials or main line rings, so having more buttons available to speed dial or see the status of other associates.
• There is a definite premium for the top of the line phone.  Generally speaking, these cost about $100 more than the base phone.  If the dollars don’t seem too bad, the percentage of increase would – 83%!  Ouch!

At sipVine, the majority of phones we utilize in our installations are the Cisco SPA500 series.  Perhaps a sign of economic turnaround is that more companies have been willing to pay the premium for the nicer desk phones.  When compared to the desk phones attached to popular on-site systems, they still are very affordable. 

About the author:  Mark Greim is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at sipVine, a provider of a variety of digital phone solutions and services. Mark has extensive experience working for start-up or entrepreneurial organizations and a passion for affordable, reliable, and purposeful technology solutions in those environments. 

sipVine, a nationwide provider of VoIP solutions, announces the launch of a refreshed website.  Robert Conner, sipVine CEO remarks:  “This revision has been a long time coming, and this truly better represents the organization in many ways.  More importantly, our philosophies and principles of customer satisfaction are prominently displayed throughout the site.”

sipVine thanks the many customers who volunteered for photo shoots.  “It was very important to us to have this site be a reflection of those who have made our growth possible, our customers.  Photographing ‘real’ people happy with their phone service was the goal, and there’s no one better to represent this feeling than sipVine customers”, add Mark Greim, Vice President of Sales and Marketing.

New visitors to the site have the opportunity to view sipVine’s digital phone solutions, request additional information, download whitepapers, and request quotes.  One of sipVine’s points of differentiation is the fact that their solution representatives consult with potential customers to customize the delivery of the phone solution that will work best for them.  This is why sipVine does not have an automated quote tool on the website.  From proposing the solution to designing the ultimate configuration of the program, such customization will maximize the benefits to the customer and drive their ultimate satisfaction.

Existing customers can utilize the site to download documentation and templates, request service or administration, schedule their holiday greetings, submit a referral, and even advertise their services to our other customers!  Referrals continue to be sipVine’s largest source of new customers, also reflecting the customer satisfaction driven by the service delivered.

Phone technology in the business environment continues to improve as more companies shift to hosted VoIP services.  Many companies have incorporated desk phone alternatives in their office environment, such as soft phones that operate on their computers.

Check with your current or potential hosted VoIP provider to see if they support soft phone products.  sipVine, as an example, supports the soft phone line up from Counterpath.  Full featured soft phones range in price from $34 to $45, making it extremely economical to deploy in the office environments.  One key is to have a quality headset to utilize in conjunction with these phones.

Applications – Use of soft phones range from a full deployment among all associates to selected or complimentary assignment.  Companies may select associates who work from home or travel frequently to have soft phones set up on their lap top computers.  Similar to having an office desk phone at home, a benefit of the hosted VoIP phone systems is that these individuals will have the appearance of being on the in-house phone system, with the ability to include them in ring groups and to extension dial or transfer calls internally.  Additionally, some employees may have soft phones set up as a compliment to their office desk phone.  In these cases, the soft phone is set up to ring at the same time as the desk phone.  Associates only turn the soft phone on when they are working remotely.

Other Alternatives – Soft phones are also available for the Apple iPad or iPhone, allowing those devices to be utilized as an extension of the office phone.  For the iPad, there are available headsets to allow for better ease of use.  It is not recommended that these devices be utilized as a primary office phone, as they are dependent upon a solid WiFi or 3G/4G signal.  We would not recommend use of this version of soft phone while driving or moving around.  However, when traveling internationally, this is a great alternative to paying international minutes on your cell phone!

Soft phones are just another example of how a hosted VoIP service can transform your business, making associates more efficient and accessible to your customers.  Contact a hosted VoIP provider today to learn more about the benefits of moving to a hosted phone system.

About the author:  Mark Greim is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at sipVine, a provider of a variety of digital phone solutions and services. Mark has extensive experience working for start-up or entrepreneurial organizations and a passion for affordable, reliable, and purposeful technology solutions in those environments. 

There are a number of VoIP phone models and manufacturers, and choosing the right ones can make or break hosted VoIP phone service providers.  sipVine, a nationwide provider of hosted phone service, chooses to promote Cisco and Polycom models for its VoIP phone line-up for a variety of reasons.  

Best of Breed – Certainly, there’s an element of name recognition in these phones that provides credibility to a privately held provider such as sipVine.  Selecting Cisco and Polycom, both best of breed manufacturers, provides obvious advantages to companies in this segment.  Quality manufacturing, product warrantees, and overall reliability are extremely important, and the benefits are felt by end user customers.

Ease of Use – When end user customers are transitioning to new technology, delivering phones that allow for the vast VoIP feature set to be intuitive and easy to use is paramount to the success of a hosted phone service provider.  sipVine has found that both of these manufacturers have crafted their phones to be easy to use and adapt to a variety of VoIP software platforms.

Flexibility in Programming – End user customers are not interested in how easy a phone is to configure with the software, but they do benefit in the outcomes of flexible, adaptable phones.  As an example, sipVine is able to keep the phone system affordable to the end user by virtue of the ability to devise configuration scripts which can mass configure large numbers of phones.  Setting up small and large businesses is quick and easy, which keeps installation charges low.  Additionally, sipVine has been able to add several features and custom design the customer configuration in large part due to the phone line-up selected.

Phone Line Up is Not Proprietary – With the Polycom phones and the Cisco Small Business series, the phones are not proprietary to a manufacturer base system.  This allows hosted companies to adapt the phones to its particular VoIP software.  It also fits well with providers such as sipVine, which does not hold their customers to term contracts.  sipVine recognizes that companies are making decisions both on the technology and the provider and wants to allow customers the flexibility to move their phones to another hosted provider if sipVine doesn’t meet all expectations.  Fortunately, this flexibility has produced very infrequent movement away, but is a compelling message nonetheless.

Additional Benefits Specific to Cisco – Simply put, sipVine and end user customers love
these phones.  They are very easy to use and provide a number of custom approaches in deployment.  The screens and menu options are very easy to understand and follow, and the line appearance buttons allow for a variety of use, such as speed dials with user presence indicators, park placement and retrieval, and direct dial and main line delivery.

Additional Benefits Specific to Polycom – Hands down, Polycom speaker phone technology is the best in the business.  For end users who utilize the speaker phone feature routinely, they cannot go wrong with a Polycom phone.  Certainly, most people are very familiar with the conference room phones offered by Polycom.  Because of the quality of the speaker on the desk phones, many customers deploy a desk phone in smaller conference rooms to save on the expense of the more traditional conference room phone.  Polycom phones are also easy to use and, if it matters, they are just darned good looking as well!

A quality line up of VoIP phones is an important criterion for hosted phone service provider selection.  You cannot go wrong with Cisco and Polycom phones in a provider’s line up!

About the author:  Mark Greim is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at sipVine, a provider of a variety of digital phone solutions and services. Mark has extensive experience working for start-up or entrepreneurial organizations and a passion for affordable, reliable, and purposeful technology solutions in those environments. 

If you have been holding off replacing your existing business phone system due to the cost, consider a Hosted VoIP solution.  Many companies are keeping the band-aids handy as they continue to defer the costs of making a phone system investment and haven’t yet considered the many benefits of evolving to an affordable alternative with a hosted VoIP provider.  Such decisions are also costly, as spending money on the repair and servicing on an old system can also add up. 

Consider these benefits of a Hosted VoIP solution relative to system replacement:

• Low Initial Investment – With a Hosted VoIP system, you are effectively securing space on the phone system of your hosted service provider.  Therefore, your up-front investment will only be for the number of VoIP phones you will need and some other minor network equipment. 
• Elimination or Reduction in Administrative and Maintenance Charges – Good hosted VoIP service providers include the cost of administering your phone system in the monthly phone service fees. 
• All-Inclusive Monthly Service Rates – Most providers deliver an unlimited local and long distance package to help bring down the cost of the monthly phone service.  Keep in mind that when you go to a hosted model, you are paying by the number of phones you have in service and not by the number of “lines”.  With VoIP, the line concept goes away and you will no longer have restrictions in calls based upon the number of lines deployed.
• Improvement in Communication – A hosted system typically is very robust, giving your business access to a feature set that would be substantially more expensive to purchase under a stand-alone on-site phone system.  Companies taking full advantage of the feature set enhance their internal and external communication processes.
• Enabling Mobile or Remote Workforce – Many companies deploy workers from their homes or alternative locations.  With a hosted service, you can provide these employees with phones and to callers internal or external to your business, it will be as if these employees are operating within the walls of your business.

I’ve written about a number of advantages to these types of systems over the years.  By far, companies who are considering replacing their old phone systems find these benefits to be at the top of their list when deciding to go with a hosted phone service platform.

About the author:  Mark Greim is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at sipVine, a provider of a variety of digital phone solutions and services. Mark has extensive experience working for start-up or entrepreneurial organizations and a passion for affordable, reliable, and purposeful technology solutions in those environments. 

Inherent in your business VoIP phone system and service are many cool features.  However, good hosted digital phone service providers can consult with you on many accessories that best integrate a robust feature set into your business operations.  Below are just a few features that will fully accessorize your VoIP phone system:

Paging Options – Depending upon the phones deployed by your vendor, you can have a variety of paging options deployed using the phones.  For example, the Cisco 500 series phones allow for direct one to one or multicast paging to all phones.  They can be programmed to not interrupt an active conversation, or putting an active conversation on hold.  Many find the latter option to be intrusive, but some need to have that capability.  Additionally, using a special adapter, your voice system can attach to an overhead paging system.  This is great for warehouse or environments where people are highly mobile around the office.

Ringers / Strobes – Loud or large warehouse or manufacturing environments need to have some method to better hear the ringing of the phone in their area.  There are specially designed loud ringers with strobe lights that will put no doubt in people’s minds that the phone is ringing!  VoIP phone system and service providers who specialize in the type of customization required in such designs can integrate these ringers into the ring patterns for the area.  They are relatively inexpensive, but they do require power and Ethernet to the area they will be deployed.

Mobile Employee Phone Deployment – One of the biggest challenges in any phone system deployment is enabling the highly mobile facility employee who is an important receiver of phone calls with the technology to make them most effective.  There are many devices to make this possible, and your VoIP phone service provider should be able to consult with you on the cost/benefit or advantages/disadvantages of each.  There are good VoIP WiFi phones, but these tend to be expensive and are subject to a good WiFi environment in the facility.  You can also integrate various types of traditional cordless phones or engage cell phones into the call flow for the business.

Park – One of the features of a VoIP system that fits well in environments mentioned above is an easy to operate Park feature.  Calls should be able to be parked and picked up with one touch process from any phone on the network.

Softphones – Your business telephone no longer has to be tied down to your desk!  You can deploy softphones on your laptop, iPad/tablet, or cell phone that function just like your desk phone.  You can deploy these in conjunction with your desk phone (rings both devices) or they can replace your desk phone all together. Very cool!

Desktop Faxing - Faxing is an old technolgy that continues to hang on in business enviorments.  So, why not pull it into this century by deploying faxing to and from your desktop?  Additionally, this option helps eliminate paper and creates a great opportunity for electronic storage of your data.  Cool AND great for the environment too!

There are many exciting features in a VoIP phone system/service.  You will find that you can build a system that optimizes your business’ communication pattern at a very affordable price.  Contact a VoIP phone service company today to find out more.

About the author:  Mark Greim is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at sipVine, a provider of a variety of digital phone solutions and services. Mark has extensive experience working for start-up or entrepreneurial organizations and a passion for affordable, reliable, and purposeful technology solutions in those environments. 

sipVine has long provided inbound faxing to email and has now added desktop outbound faxing capabilities to our service offerings.  This service allows sipVine customers to send faxes from their computers either through their email, a desktop applet, or through a web portal. Previously, sipVine only offered outbound faxing via the fax machine.

sipVine will deliver a new fax number for this purpose, although only in limited areas we may be able to utilize your current fax number.  Inbound faxes can be delivered with a PDF file to one or multiple email addresses and you can assign one or more users to this fax number.  Customers can add as many additional fax numbers as they would like.

Although faxing is not a new technology, we embrace more efficient approaches to the process and this upgrade certainly applies.  sipVine customers involved in the testing indicate that it is easy to use, fast, and affordable!

This service is available to sipVine customers only and is not offered on a stand-alone basis. 

About the author:  Mark Greim is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at sipVine, a provider of a variety of digital phone solutions and services. Mark has extensive experience working for start-up or entrepreneurial organizations and a passion for affordable, reliable, and purposeful technology solutions in those environments. 

Deciding upon the best phone service provider can be challenging for any business.  Given new technology, there are a host of new options available to you in the marketplace and you are no longer bound to your traditional telephone provider.  You should start by determining your organization’s ability/desire to utilize new technology in your communication practices and identifying the characteristics of a phone service provider that will meet your expectations.

If your company desires to utilize new technology in your communication practices and you want to keep the capital expenses low for such an endeavor, you can consider a hosted phone service provider.  This literally opens up the competition to a number of great providers.  These providers provide both the phone service and phone system, as the phone system is provided in a cloud environment and the service is delivered over the internet.  Additionally, if your company has points of presence in multiple cities or has virtual employees, they all can be on a common phone system and you can consolidate service providers!

The process of narrowing down your potential list of hosted phone service providers can be
quite daunting.  Set your expectations high, as new entrants in this marketplace have helped push customer service to new heights.  Here is a list of questions for potential service providers that can help you narrow the list:

1. Describe your approach to customer service.  Do I have an account team to rely upon?  How are requests for service handled and are there multiple ways to create a service ticket?
2. Do you conduct a consultative session with me on customizing the configuration for the hosted phone service so that it conforms to how we do business?
3. How do you handle VoIP voice quality management?  Do you deploy a device on our network or do you manage this solely by bandwidth expansion?
4. Describe your hosted platform.  Is it located in a secure data facility?  What redundancies are built in? 
5. What disaster recovery options are available to me with your service?
6. Given our industry, what features do you believe we will benefit the most from?

These questions will help qualify candidates and you can narrow down competitiveness of bids from the providers who answer the above qualifications to your satisfaction.  First and foremost, judging the potential provider on their willingness and ability to get to know you and your needs through the qualification stage is a great indicator of the type of service they will provide.  Those providers who are experienced in working in multiple industries and can provide the consultation necessary to appropriately customize the solution to meet your expectations will clearly rise to the top.

Many focus on the features, coolness factor, and price, but fail to be able to truly understand your business and what is important to you.  Your business deserves to be supported by a provider who can be seen as your phone department rather than a vendor.

About the author:  Mark Greim is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at sipVine, a provider of a variety of digital phone solutions and services. Mark has extensive experience working for start-up or entrepreneurial organizations and a passion for affordable, reliable, and purposeful technology solutions in those environments. 

At sipVine, our team has been asked occasionally to define “smart business” as it relates to our slogan, The Digital Phone Solution for Smart Business.  Although this is certainly an opinion, it is an opinion formed through many years of business experience.  Thus, we submit this list for your consideration and demonstrate the value of sipVine’s Digital Phone Solution against these attributes.

Smart Business….

1. Endeavors to stay current with new technologies.  Migrating applications to the cloud is a trend that is clearly on an accelerating path.  Cloud telephony migration in the business community is a growing trend and will replace traditional analog services in the not too distant future.  sipVine’s hosted digital phone solution delivers many advantages consistent with bringing new technologies into the business.
2. Develops partnerships with service providers and vendors. The best relationships are formed under a win/win scenario.  Selection of providers and vendors who share that goal improves the business climate and helps make the organization better.  At sipVine, our goal is to be seen as the phone “department” for our customers.  We have established multiple points of access to our service team and strive to deliver the perception that we are just “down the hall” when providing service, whether you are a local customer or a customer in another state.
3. Creates efficiencies throughout the organization.  Delivering results that favorably impact the bottom line is an everyday objective of smart business.  Whether this is from direct savings on your phone service bill, or from efficiencies derived from the feature set of a digital phone solution, sipVine’s goal is to deliver these benefits to all of our customers.
4. Continually improves communication practices with customers.  One of the best ways to retain and grow a customer base is to develop ways to refine and improve communication practices.  Digital phone technology allows for great flexibility and custom programming to achieve better and more customer pleasing communications.  sipVine has many years of providing service, and has built a solid list of best practices.  We combine a consultative approach with our flexible, custom design to absolutely deliver on this attribute of a smart business.
5. Empowers workforce to delight its customer base.  There are many practices a smart business can deploy to empower a workforce.  In the context of a digital phone solution, the advantages are aplenty.  A hosted environment can provide a virtual environment for employees who are in the field with the customers from which to operate and communicate more effectively.  Custom automated attendants can route callers to the right employees to handle customer requests.  Call groups, queues, and other routines can be deployed to achieve maximum customer satisfaction.

There are many other attributes of a smart business, and we believe sipVine offers the digital phone solution to meet their needs!

About the author:  Mark Greim is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at sipVine, a provider of a variety of digital phone solutions and services. Mark has extensive experience working for start-up or entrepreneurial organizations and a passion for affordable, reliable, and purposeful technology solutions in those environments.