Cloud Hosted IP PBX For Features and Cost Savings

Is this the right time to move your business telephone services to the cloud? You are clearly at a decision point if your current system has run out of capacity, frequently needs repair or is no longer supported. But even if what you have in-house is working fine, you could be missing the opportunity to add productivity features or reduce your communications costs that the latest generation of hosted PBX solutions offer.

A good example is the new version 2.0 Cloud Hosted IP PBX from Airespring called AirePBX. This system completely integrates your fixed and mobile voice communications across all devices and all business locations. That’s important because smartphones are often left out of the loop with traditional PBX systems. If you have branch offices or have grown your business through acquisition, chances are that you have a hodgepodge of telephone equipment unique to each location.

It’s not hard to see how telecom managers can become frustrated when asked to do anything but make voice calls over the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). With most telephony solutions, the PSTN is the only common denominator. That can leave you wanting for some of the newest and most popular calling features. It can also be a source of unnecessary costs if you must use the public telephone network when you could be using your own data network.

AirePBX, like other hosted VoIP solutions, takes the job of managing a telephone network out of your hands and into a service cloud managed by specialists. With hosted PBX, there is very little in the way of telephone equipment onsite. The PBX goes away. So does all that telephone wiring. You no longer need telephone lines or trunks for outside calls, because that is all handled in the cloud. What you have is telephones that plug right into your LAN and an on-premise enterprise grade session border controller to manage VoIP and data traffic.

What kind of features can you expect with a hosted solution? AirePBX offers HD voice for sound clarity beyond what you think a telephone is capable of. It has a full featured auto attendant, or automated receptionist. With this, even the smallest companies can make a big impression on their customers without having to hire a dedicated operator. You can swap devices mid-call. If someone calls your office phone as you are about to leave your desk, quickly switch the call to your smartphone and continue the conversation on the go. Of course, you also get advanced call routing, find me/follow me, simultaneous ring, caller ID, call forwarding, call park, call transfer, conferencing, fax to email, unified visual voice mail, three-way calling, toll-free numbers, virtual extensions and the ability to manage it all using an online management portal.

Sounds good, but don’t you have to spend a lot of money upgrading your phones? Not at all. AirePBX provides advanced IP desk phones as part of your service at no extra charge. You also get the session border controller at no charge and free professional on-site install. You simply pay per seat per month for the number of phones, “seats”, that you are using. When you need more, you can easily add them. You never pay for capacity that you aren’t using. That alone gives you a business flexibility that you probably don’t have now.

What are the cost savings? AireSpring estimates that you can save up to 50% over the cost of traditional telephone service by moving your PBX or Key System to the cloud. How much can you save? Why not get a quote for cloud hosted IP PBX service from AireSpring and other competitive providers and find out. You could be looking at a major reduction in your communications expenses with better performance as well.

Hosted Exchange Email Service Advantages

POP3 is the email service we love to hate. Both businesses and individuals are so entrenched with POP3 email that switching to something else seems like a major and unnecessary upset. Here’s why you should consider just such a move and the benefits you’ll enjoy if you do.

Just what is POP3 anyway? POP stands for Post Office Protocol. It’s a longstanding Internet standard offered by nearly all Internet Service Providers (ISPs). POP3 refers to the 3rd version of this standard, which is the current version.

POP email is based on a client-server model. The email server is provided by your ISP, email service provider, employer data center or Web hosting company. The client is installed on your PC. When your PC mail is active, the client checks periodically, say every 5 minutes, with the server to see if there is new mail. If so, the client downloads it to the PC. Most people have it set up to delete downloaded email messages from the server, but you can leave them up there if you wish. The only problem with this is that messages pile up and you can run out of your assigned storage quickly.

What’s a client? Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail and Eudora are examples of POP email clients. What they have in common is that they are installed on a particular computer, store your messages locally on that computer, and communicate with a POP3 server over the Internet.

An advantage of POP3 is that once the mail is downloaded, you don’t have to be online to read your messages. You know that if you are using Webmail and lose your Internet connection, you’ve lost your link to your email account. With POP3, you can read your stack of messages, put them in particular files for storage, and search your computer to find an old email message.

That’s the good part. The bad part is that if you lose your computer, say a laptop, or your hard drive crashes, you can lose years of valuable email messages in an instant. Unless you’ve backed them up somewhere they are gone for good. If you trade up to a new computer, you have to transfer all those messages, too, or you won’t be able to get to them. Also, any messages that came into your desktop computer and were deleted from the server won’t be accessible on your laptop computer when you are out and about. The reverse is also true.

Then there’s the really bad part. That’s the spam and viruses that we’re constantly fending off. Many of us have far more spam messages come in than legitimate ones. Email clients have the ability to detect spam to some extent and sent it to a separate spam file. You may have a separate spam and virus program to protect your PC. Today, many service providers have a first line of defense spam and virus protection on their email servers. That helps, but a lot of junk still gets through.

Companies that want control of their corporate email run their own email servers, either in their own data centers or space rented from colocation data centers. One of the most popular server programs is Microsoft Exchange. Exchange expands pure vanilla POP email to support voice mail storage, calendar, contact organizing, faxes, and public folders for sharing information among employees. All of this is protected by secure transfers and anti-virus and anti-spam filtering in the server itself.

Microsoft Exchange is great for large corporate IT departments that have the staff and data center resources to run their own Exchange servers. Small and medium size companies may find this too much to deal with and revert to consumer grade email services or Web mail accounts just to have some way to send and receive messages. There is another option available for just these companies. It’s called Hosted Exchange.

Hosted Exchange gives you all the advantages of Microsoft Exchange without the headache of running your own server. The hosting is done by a hosting or cloud services company. They provide you with your own instance of Microsoft Exchange running on their servers. You connect via the Internet or dedicated telecom line.

With Hosted Exchange service, you not only lose the server disadvantage, but you gain the advantages of having your service in the cloud. Those include routine automatic backups so you won’t lose data. You can access your messages from your desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet from wherever you happen to be. If you accidentally delete an important email, you can generally recover your messages or entire mailboxes even weeks later. Your private mail will stay private, too. All communication with the Hosted Exchange server is done using SSL encryption just like you’d use for online shopping or banking.

Is it time you made the move to a more modern and capable email system? If so, consider Hosted Exchange email service options in the cloud. It can handle as many users and as much data as you need and offers considerable cost savings over doing it yourself.

Flat Rate Toll Free Numbers

How would you like to have a toll free number for your business without the worry that you’ll never know how big your bill will be each month? What you are looking for is flat rate toll free service. Your bill is the same every month and you’ll get dozens of features included at no extra cost. Best of all, there’s no risk to try it because you can get a 14 day free trial of flat rate toll free service.

The flat rate service from iTeleCenter is just $49 a month for unlimited calls. You pay no per minute charges, no extra fees for features, no activation fees, no surcharges or hidden fees, no confusing plans and no contracts.

What are some of those special calling features? You get professional grade business phone service such as an auto attendant with main greeting voicemail to email or text transmission, multiple extension mailboxes, online faxing, follow-me call forwarding and 30 additional features.

How about the numbers available? You have two choices in how you pick your toll free number. The first way is to simply select from a list of 10 assorted numbers that are available. These have the prefixes 800, 866, 877 and 888. If you see one you like, just click on the radio button and proceed to order it. If not, then click the “generate more numbers” button and you’ll get a new list.

The other method is to search for a custom vanity number. What is a vanity number? That’s a phone number that spells out a word or phrase using the letters that appear on the numbers of the telephone dial. You can specify any available toll free prefix, or limit your search to 855 or 866 or 877 or 888. You can also use * for wildcard digits. Those are digits where you really don’t care what number comes up. Let’s try a couple of examples and see what we get.

Say you’re in the water conditioning business and want a memorable toll free number to advertise. We’ll say any prefix is OK and that we want the term “water” to be in the toll free number. Enter “water” into the search box and press the search button. Voila! Here’s what we get. There are 10 different toll free numbers available and they all spell out water within the number. You can choose from (877) 95WATER, (855) 60WATER, (877) WATGER88 and another seven options. Don’t much care for these? Click on the Generate More Numbers button and you’ll get another 10 options. These include (855) WATER08, (855) WATER30 and seven more that are similar.

Got the idea? You may want to play around with this search engine a bit to get something that relates to your business and is easy to remember. Note that 855 is a newly added toll free prefix. You’ll likely have more options with the 855 prefix than the others because it has only been available for about a year.

What makes this system better than old-school toll free number ordering is both the interactive vanity search feature plus instant availability of your chosen toll free number. That’s right. You select the number you want and then place your order online right away before anybody else gets the same idea. That starts your 14 day free trial period. Play around with the features, decide how much of an asset this is for your business, and keep using that number as long as you keep your toll free service.

Pick Unlimited Toll Free Numbers

You know that having a toll free number is good for business. In fact, it’s so good for business that customer calls can start flooding in once you’ve gotten the word out that people can call you for free. Now, if you could just protect yourself against the cost of that onslaught. Wait! You can.

The service you want is unlimited toll free numbers. By unlimited, I mean you pay one small price per month for the complete sophisticated toll free service. No ugly surprises on your credit card. Within the limits of fair use, your toll free service is one flat rate and that’s that.

Well, you actually get a lot more than simply the peace of mind that comes from knowing what your toll free bill will be each month. This unlimited toll free service has over 30 features that you might think would cost extra. Not with iTeleCenter unlimited toll free numbers. Their toll free service offers an auto attendant or main greeting feature so you don’t need to hire a receptionist to screen your calls. You not only get voicemail, but voicemail messages sent to email or text to your cell phone. You also get online faxing and follow me call forwarding. Plus there are 30 other calling features, too.

Don’t these features sound like something you’d expect to pay big bucks for with a sophisticated business phone system? Yes they do. What’s more, with most phone services you have to pay extra for a toll free number and then pay extra per minute for every call you receive. Outrageous! That’s yesterday’s telecom service. Today’s service is one flat monthly rate that includes all phone services plus the toll free number of your choice.

Yes, you get to select your toll free number from an inventory of 800, 866, 877 and 888 numbers that are all set up and ready to use. Other companies expect you to wait for days or weeks while they do their job of preparing a toll free number of their choice for your use. Forget that. You pick the number using the handy number search box (like the screen shot shown on this page) and then proceed to grab it for your exclusive use. How long does that take? Just a few minutes. The entire process is automated online and available 24/7. If you want toll free service at 3 in the morning, go right ahead and get it. They’re always open for business.

What you get with this unlimited toll free number service is pretty amazing. What you don’t have to deal with is equally impressive. You don’t get stuck paying per minute charges for your incoming toll free calls. They’re all included in the low monthly rate. You don’t pay any activation fees. Those can be substantial with other services and you may not even find out about them until you are ready to check out. There are no extra fees for any of the calling features - they are all included. There are no surcharges or hidden fees, either.

Sounds pretty good, but you’re still not sure? What would you say if I told you that there are no contracts involved. What if it were so completely risk free that you can try it for free? That’s right. You can start your 14 day free trial right now. Give it a good shakedown and then decide if this unlimited toll free number service is right for your business. Chances are that you’ll like it so much that you’ll never shop around again.

I’ve saved the best for last. This impressive service is just $49 per month for unlimited calls. Yes, that low rate plus NO contracts to sign and a 14 day FREE trial just to make sure you’re happy.

Still Your Best Toll Free Option

Could your business benefit from having a toll free number? Perhaps you already have toll free service, but are looking at getting a better deal or upgrading to more numbers. What service makes the most business sense these days?

If you’ve never had a toll free number and aren’t positive that it will make a significant impact on your business, the best thing to do is get in cheap without making any long term commitments. That way you can test the waters and see what happens. So, how do you do that?

Kall8 offers an outstanding package of toll free services that has been popular for years. It's had staying power because you get a lot for a little with no contractual commitments.

Here’s how it works. Your lowest cost option is to pick one of the 866, 877, or 888 toll free numbers that are all set up and ready to go. It’s like visiting the toll free supermarket. Just take a number that looks good to you off the shelf and put it in your shopping cart. When you check out, you’ll fork over all of $2. That’s right, two bucks.

What do you get for your toll free $2? You get to have calls to that number ring to a phone of your choice as soon as your order is complete. That can be your office phone, home phone or cell phone. Change that option to a different phone whenever you like, even in the middle of the night. You have an online portal that gives you complete control of your toll free number 24/7.

This is huge for mobile professionals, like consultants or real estate agents. Give everybody your toll free number, set it to the phone you are at, and you’ll never miss a call. If you do happen to be busy, calls will go to your toll free voicemail. You can call in and get messages at your leisure, listen to them online, or... get this... have the sound file sent to your email. Wait! It gets better. If anyone sends a FAX message to your toll free number, you can read that message online or also have it sent to your email.

How much does this really cost? It’s $2 to get the number. Then $2 a month to maintain service plus the cost of incoming calls. Most calls, originating in the 48 contiguous US states, are 6.9 cents a minute. There’s a modest surcharge for Alaska and Hawaii. If you decide you don’t want service anymore, then cancel it. All you owe is for what you’ve been using.

How can Kall8 make an offer like this? It’s because once you have the service you’ll want to keep it forever. Since you are only paying a couple of bucks a month plus the cost of calls, the bill for your toll free service only goes up when you get more calls. More calls mean more business, so you can easily afford the calling cost. It’s one sweet deal.