In years to come we might look back at the big freeze of January 2010 and see this as the time when the country really did start to get its act together to help make sure its workers could work properly from home. We’d have the obvious benefits of being able to keep operating when a weather problem occurs, and also be somewhat more green with reductions in travel and lowering the carbon footprint. We’ll still, I am sure share tales of being stuck at the office, having to abandon cars and having a reason to talk to our business neighbours. (Ours built a snow walrus outside our front door!)

M12 Solutions snow disruption experience

At M12 we have had our share of the dramas. Our plans to leave the office early before the expected snow on Tuesday 5th Jan was thwarted somewhat by ½ of the Solent Business thinking the same thing. There was then the earlier rain shower that washed away all the salt on the hill out to the motorway – cutting everyone off. When the snow did start to fall, it wasn’t just any old snow, the flakes were the size of an old half crowns. This laid inches of cover in no time at all. One staff member queued for over an hour to just move 150 yards before abandoning his efforts. So the 7 of us left in the office decided to lock up and visit to local pub. We also recced the hill out to the motorway and work out what we should do. 3 hours and a few snacks later someone had decided that keeping the Solent Business Park grid-locked for no good reason was not appropriate, and the hill was cleared and we ventured home. The M27 was eerily clear westbound, but stacked up bumper to bumper towards Portsmouth.

How we prepared for homeworking for ALL users

Our sales staff, support and some of our other staff members are used to working from home, and can forward their DDI to their mobile, access webmail and VPN into the office to access data on shared network drives day-to-day. However, we would need to prepare all of our staff to be able to operate in this manner.

• Our ShoreTel phone system allowed us to set our mobile phones and home telephones as remote extensions. This meant that any calls to our DDIs, NGNs or telephone would get answered. This also meant that we didn’t have to confuse our customers or suppliers with different numbers.
• Our phone system also allowed us to transfer calls from our mobile/ home phones to other users – all remotely.
• In terms of our staff using our IT network, VPN connections could be established from home, and users remote desktoped to their normal computer desktop to perform as normal.
• So all staff had access to the VPN, and all users forwarded their DDI to their mobile/ home phone.

And then our main business Internet connection fails

As if things weren’t tricky enough with the weather, our Internet provider decided to have a network outage as we left on Tuesday. This lasted until early the following morning, but repeated again the following day for a further 20 hours. This posed implications for our VPN and webmail for our homeworking. However we had another redundant fail-over Internet connection connected to a failover router. A new domain name was circulated to users, and we were all up and running again using the spare Internet connection link.

Summary

It is at times like this that we can properly appreciate the value of today’s technology when carefully set up. It can provide business continuity, mean that workers can keep busy and productive, as well as give that necessary reassurance to customers that life goes on, we can serve requests and respond when needed.

From a straw poll of the impacts our clients are experiencing include:

• Workers arriving late because of the time taken to thaw their car and get it onto a gritted road.
• People being unable to get out of their road due to ice and snow, so unable to get into the office and also people having to look after children because of the school closures.
• The compound effect, when you add to the list those who just won’t travel (because of AA advice perhaps)  we think that only 25% of most organisations are “at work” and “at the office”.

Quite apart from the obvious cost to the country in lost productivity we think that organisations should seize this as an opportunity to properly test through their contingency planning and back up processes, and then review where there are weaknesses. Obviously, M12 can help with Voice and Internet aspects as well as give useful advice from mobile phones to soft-phone integration.

Enjoy the snow, it might be a while before we get a freeze like this again.

M12 can provide solutions to help you now

Voice

• Install a Voice over IP phone system for easy homeworking, working with softphones on laptops, web client to initiate calls from office to remote phone (so that the office pays for the entire call).
• Available products: SpliceCom Phone System, ShoreTel Phone System

Data

• Install a high capacity leased line for times where upload bandwidth are important for lots of VPN connections
• Install our ADSL Failover service. Two ADSL connections, two different ADSL ISPs, two different core networks, same IP address, no problems.

Mobiles

• Let M12 Solutions help you understand which staff to give mobile phones, what type of package you need, what mobile network would be best, what the best deal is.

SpliceCom Vision was developed to avoid the situation of dealing with 3rd party providers, and the trouble of integrating products that aren’t specifically designed for one particular phone system. This very fact ensures that Vision is very easy to use, install and maintain.

SpliceCom Vision is hosted on a Mac Mini, but accessible from any Internet browser, iPhone or other capable mobile browser.

SpliceCom Vision was developed from the ground-up, consolidating all of the best features from similar application suites, into one, easy-to-manage solution. It beats any third party call logger or call recording software package, and often comes at a fraction of the price, whilst providing key advantages over its more expensive competitors.

SpliceCom Vision Offers Information for 4 Critical Areas

1. Vision Reports
2. Vision Recording
3. Vision Live
4. Vision Mobility

Vision Reports

Vision Reports provides 21 areas of call reporting. From a list of the most expensive calls together with a graph, to a list of abandoned calls providing information of users and departments that are loosing calls. Reports can be created on demand, or set up to be automatically sent to E-mail addresses.

Vision Recording

Vision Recording arguably offers the most cost effective and easy way of recording phone calls for the SpliceCom Phone System. SpliceCom Vision also encrypts the voice calls using AES encryption – vital for FSA regulated organisations. Recording is seamlessly integrated into the call reports, providing the recording against the user who placed or received the call at a particular time.

Vision Live

Vision Live is the wall board feature of SpliceCom Vision. It provides a web-based dashboard for you to add real-time call statistics, BLF and reports to display on a large plasma/ LCD screen. It also allows you to display web pages where you could display custom intranet based pages, or just the latest news.

Vision Mobility

Vision Mobility enables management of your telephone extension from any Internet web browser or your iPhone. It enables functionality similar to that of the PCS 50 or PCS 60 from your web browser. You can search the system-wide directory and then set up calls, directly from your web browser. From your iPhone, by setting up remote PSTN to be your iPhone, your iPhone will behave like it is directly connected to your SpliceCom Phone System as an extension. You can then record, log and manage your calls directly to the SpliceCom Vision system, whilst operating from a remote location.

SpliceCom Vision Works Globally

M12 Solutions have installed many SpliceCom Vision solutions to customers. The most notable install is a customer who has a site in Sydney, Australia and another site in Bristol, UK. This customer have installed a 5100 Call Server in their Bristol office, together with a Mac Mini hosting the SpliceCom Vision application, and their Sydney branch has a 5108  Call Server providing local telephony capabilities there. A secure VPN tunnel was created over their ADSL broadband connection from their Sydney office to Bristol on which the two SpliceCom call servers link up as one. A separate Mac Mini is not required for Sydney, as recordings and call data can be sent over the secure VPN tunnel to the Bristol based Mac Mini. Sydney users browse to Mac Mini over their VPN to view their call recordings and reports, and the Bristol users can do the same. Both sites work off the same Mac Mini, users at Bristol can see call information and recording for Sydney users, and vice versa.

SpliceCom Vision is Resillient

SpliceCom Vision can cope with the intermittent problems often affecting ADSL broadband connections. Recordings and call data are stored on the local call server until the link returns, upon which they are transferred to the Mac Mini. Typically Internet connections can be down from anything from a few minutes to a few hours. The remote Call Server is able to store a many hours of recordings until the link is restored. The moment the link is restored, the recordings and call data are transferred over the VPN tunnel to the remote Mac Mini hosting SpliceCom Vision.

Compatibility and Requirements

• SpliceCom 4100, 4140, 5100 & 5108 Call Servers running version 3.2 of the SpliceCom Software are compatible.
• All IP/ Analogue/ Remote PSTN (mobile phones/ home phones) are compatible.
• An Apple Mac is required that runs 24/7 hosting the SpliceCom Vision software.
• For each remote site that wishes to run off the one SpliceCom Vision instance, a VPN tunnel needs to be created back to the site with the SpliceCom Vision application.

Get a Quote/ Express Interest/ Request a Free Trial

Please contact M12 Solutions Ltd on 0845 408 1212 or;
E-Mail at info@m12solutions.co.uk or;
visit the web site at www.m12solutions.co.uk

M12 Solutions Ltd are an authorised SpliceCom Reseller, Installer, Maintainer and Trainer. M12 have installed over 150 SpliceCom Phone Systems, and continue to maintain and support many of these. M12 have successfuly installed numerous SpliceCom Vision instances at a number of companies as part of new installs and upgrades for exisiting customers. M12 have experience of installing SpliceCom Vision for multiple sites, where all sites run off one SpliceCom Vision instance over a secure VPN tunnel.

M12 Solutions Internet Connectivity Portfolio

• ADSL, ADSL2, ADSL 2+
• LLU
• SDSL
• Leased Lines: 2Mb/s to 1Gb/s
• Ethernet
• Private Circuits

Internet Connectivity Features

• MPLS
• QoS
• ADSL Failover
• Managed Firewall/ VPN

Learn More

• View the product pages at www.m12solutions.co.uk/internet_connectivity.html or;
• Ring 0845 408 1212 or;
• E-Mail at info@m12solutions.co.uk

M12 has now completed its final release of the system which is really easy for staff to use and includes phones at better than high street prices. Neil Ayton, Financial Controller of Matchtech explains “We need to have a benefits package which helps us to enhance our brand as an employer, and introducing an innovative mobile deal offering significant tax savings is an obvious benefit. M12 have helped us do this with their Mobile Salary Sacrifice Portal”.

Andrew Skipsey, MD of M12 Solutions, “We believe the Internet Portal we have created, which covers all network operators and is also the result of some major business collaborations, has made a unique offering in the telecoms sector. Matchtech are the first of a long list of corporates we expect to connect up in the coming months. For their staff, getting a phone deal which saves Income Tax and National Insurance is an obvious advantage for people looking to reduce their costs.”

For more information on the scheme from M12 Solutions, please contact David Stephens on 01489 555686. We are also able to provide a demonstration of the Portal. For more information on the scheme please visit the product page. http://www.m12solutions.co.uk/mobile_phone_salary_sacrifice.html

Matchtech employs over 250 people and is the country’s biggest “Single Site” recruitment firm. It is AIM listed and has been a client of M12 Solutions for over 6 years. See www.matchtech.com

This means that callers calling your 0870 will incur you a cost per minute (~3p/min), as well as your caller paying the national rate charge (~10p/min). If you use an 0870 number for your main business number or support line then these charges will mount up costing your business many thousands of pounds a year. Therefore 0870 numbers no longer make sense for the business, and especially your customers.

Call M12 Solutions now on 0845 408 1212 to discuss how we can prevent these charges from occurring by better use of Non Geographic Numbers (NGN) (0871, 0845, 03xx, 0800, 0808). Alternatively visit our website at http://www.m12solutions.co.uk/ where you will find lots of information on NGN numbers.

Definitions:

• Rebates or revenue sharing is where you receive money back from the network provider when a call is made to a 0870 number.
• Non-Geographic-Numbers are numbers which don’t reveal your business’ location through the STD code. Some examples of NGNs include 0870, 0871, 0845, 0800, 0808, 03xx numbers.
• Benefit of NGNs include call handling technology in the network such as queuing calls, reading out messages, and call recording. This results in limited telecoms hardware in your business.