I agree that gift cards are sucky gifts-- but it at least is shows that you put SOME effort into it. If you give cash, thats just like saying "oh I don't really care but I know I had to give you something."
Gift Cards, Instant Phone Cards, Lotto Tickets, and the like are only recommended if you waited until the absolute last minute before gift shopping.
It is very ignorant to believe that only Americans have any management skills. Yes, I'm a manager. And programmers that my company has working in Eastern Europe are probably more efficiently managed than they are in the US. That place is run like a military base.
There are a couple of easy ones that I use and re-use every year always with good results:
In a hurry:Blockbuster Gift Card. Who doesn't go to Blockbuster? Geeks who use Netflix, right? Well stop trying to convert those poor ole simple folk and give them what they need-- a way to pay off that $15 3-day late fee. Another quick gift (if you are REALLY last minute) is an Instant Prepaid Phone Card. Some companies (NobelCom.com springs to mind) will even send out a gift e-mail along with the Access Number and PIN on whatever day the event is-- for instance, have it arrive on someone's birthday. This is a good gift for people who make a lot of International calls (think H1B workers and non-resident aliens), but other than that, you suck if you are so last minute that you have to buy an instant phone card as a gift.
Gourmet Food: Everyone likes to eat tastey things. Try iGourmet.com for a wide selection on everything from wine and cheese to curred ostrich, and try Dans.com for the best chocolates anywhere.
Flowers: Women love flowers. Gay men love flowers. Heck, little girls love flowers. I sent flowers to my 12-year-old niece for her birthday in October and she loved them! KaBloom.com consistantly has the best presentation when you open the box compared to 800flowers or FTD. Too bad their website is kinda hokey.
Designer Apparel: Nothing says "I know style" like a new pair of Gucci, Christian Dior, or Versace glasses. You can get these in stores everywhere (try Sunglass Hut and Solstice), or for the really good stuff, online at eyewearcentre.com. Beware discount vendors like 'EyeSave', and especially stay away from eBay. There are more fake designer glasses on eBay than there are fake Rolexes in a New York Street Vendor's cart-- and even though you probably can't tell, trust me, your mark can and will notice a fake. The most important things when picking designer apparel are: Get something from THIS SEASON'S COLLECTION. Getting last year's stuff on sale will NOT go over well. Make sure this is a color or style that looks ok on your mark. If you are clueless, look at that person's existing favorite clothes, glasses, etc. for reference. For glasses: make sure that you get the right shape for that person's face type. Again, if clueless, look at that person's existing stuff, or see this nice chart.
>>>if dealing with programmers overseas is more appealing to the bottom line, why not let your programmers work from home for 50-80% of their current in-office pay?
Because programmers overseas work for less than 10% what current in-office American programmers work for, and there are no benefits or American legal entanglements to worry about.
A PhD programmer with a western education and 5 years of experience in a former soviet block country will VERY happily work for USD$700/month. A somewhat less experienced programmer in the same country will very happily work for $450/month...
So look at it from your employer's point of view: Get rid of 1 high priced American programmer or IT specialist or whatever, lose all the legal HR worrying, and replace that person with 10 eastern europeans (or Indians for that matter).
Now thats not to say that there aren't some drawbacks... For instance, there will be communications problems, both with language and with culture. You will also typically be restricted to meetings via video-conferencing and not having your emails answered for 12+ hours due to tomezone differences. But I think I can live with that for a 10-times inrease in performance. Wouldn't you?
I have abour 200 domains that I administer for my company. Most of them are in 1 DomainDirect account, but there are a bunch spread out over 5 or 6 different registries.
The best solution that I've come up with so far is to have all of the domain registrars use the same email address (in this case admin@mydomain.com) which I use ONLY for contact with the registrars, and I put it under a very heavy spamfilter rating.
Then the only problem is that I have to remember to check that email account once a week or so.
not allowing laptops isnt an option. some users need mobile connectivity as part of their work.
As for putting these users in a DMZ or requiring updates every morning... That would require all users to come in 25 minutes early and also a much larger IT staff just to do the updates. That would be too expensive really.
As for anti-virus scanners... We use TechData and Norton Corporate, but you know some of those worms and viruses just seem to find their way around them. For instance, I've got Norton doing an update once daily on my home machine, and I still got the Blaster virus thanks to my not patching soon enough.
If every laptop user had to be subjected to virus scans and patches every day, everyone would have to come in 25 minutes earlier for work every day, plus we'd need to have a much larger IT staff. This would be far more costly than what it costs us to clean up a toxic virus spill 3 times per week.
This kind of solution wouldn't really work as there are many users who bring a laptop in every day and need to have access to Exchange, the File Server, our CRM software, etc. I'm not talking about visitors to the office (who we actually can keep on a DMZ), but about regular team members.
>> 1.) Use a firewall to block unnecessary access from the external network
Really this doesn't work as well as you'd think. If you have laptop users on your network, which nearly everyone does, its analagous to wearing a plastic bubble suit but having unprotected sex with strangers every weekday morning.
My office has about 60 users in it and is protected by PIX firewalls and techdata's email virus scanner. We have about 20 Windows servers in our server room (this doesn't include the many dozens of servers running Linux or Solaris, or the machines at one of our 3 colo sites), and we patch them all about once a month. Office workstations are forced to patch themselves weekly through a distributed Windowsupdate. So yeah, this should be pretty safe, right?
Well about 3 times per week some user brings in a laptop, plugs it in to the LAN, and we get some new worm running around the office LAN.
Bank of America recently updated the software on their ATMs in Southern California. Now when you first put your card in, insted of asking for your PIN, it says something to the effect of (in all caps mind you):
"BANK OF AMERICA HAS RECENTLY UPDATED THIS ATM TO MAKE IT EASIER TO USE. SOME OF THE BUTTONS THAT YOU MAY BE USED TO PRESSING NOW ARE IN DIFFERENT LOCATIONS. PRESS ANY BUTTON TO CONTINUE."
So I go and press the biggest button on there, which happens to be the "cancel" button, and it spits out my card forcing me to start over again.
Nowadays, information security has become a major concern with all kinds of end users, as most documents are now stored electronically. Business and personal files must be kept safe from unwanted intruders. ABIT has had a lot of experience in the field of data protection for motherboards: We were the first company to adopt RAID as a standard specification of all motherboards, beginning in 2001. This initiative was welcomed by end-users and media, and it also soon became an industry standard.
ABIT listened to users who were asking for information security. In July 2003, we are the first company to introduce this feature on our motherboards. Secure IDE is a device that connects to your IDE hard disk and has a special decoder key; without this key, your hard disk cannot be opened by anyone. Thus hackers and would be information thieves cannot access your hard disk, even if they remove it from your PC. Protect your privacy and keep anyone from snooping into your information. Lock down your hard disk, not with a password, but with hardware encryption. A password can be cracked by software in a few hours. ABIT?s SecureIDE will keep government supercomputers busy for weeks and will keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files forever.
How to Use ABIT?s Secure IDE to Protect your Information/Data?
SecureIDE is a encryption device that uses the eNOVA X-Wall chipset that ensures confidentiality and privacy of your data through disk encryption. When booting up your system, go to DOS and implement the FDISK instruction. This instruction will make a partition to format the Hard Disk to accept the secure IDE key. After this procedure, there are no more extra steps to perform besides using the key to ?open? the hard disk each time you boot up your system.
Nowadays it is necessary to have information security no matter what field your data comes from: business, scientific, government or copywrite protection. Only Secure IDE can protect you data and your privacy.
"OpenSWF.org is the source for information on the Flash File Format. Here you will find file format specifications, sample code, links to 3rd party tools and more.
SWF is the file format used by Macromedia Flash to deliver graphics, animation and sound over the Internet. Almost 95% of web users can view SWF content without having to install a new plug-in, and over 300 million people have downloaded the Flash player. Macromedia published the specifications for SWF in April 1998. This site has resources for programmers who want to read, write or play SWF files."
I've been using T-Mobile's GPRS Internet service for about 7 months now on my Sony-Ericsson P800 phone/PDA.
Good Points: - Very good coverage area. I've driven up and down the California coast from San Diego to Lake Tahoe and I can get at least SOME connectivity in every town. I also had no problems in South Florida. I think this is because T-Mobile is one of the few big companies that doesn't have 1 iota of its own network in the USA (they are owned by German Telekom afterall), and they have coverage agreements with Cingular, SprintPCS, etc... which works pretty much everywhere. - Fast download speeds. I don't know about the 56k quoted in the article. I typically get much faster download speeds more along the lines of what you'd expect with a bad cable connection. -You get access to both the T-Mobile WAP stuff, and regular Internet access with a real IP address, etc. Also T-Mobile has quite a nice image-compressing web proxy with user configurable options to speed things along for you.
Bad Points: - Either GPRS technology is incredibly unreliable, or T-Mobile has some serious problems with their infrastructure. I am constantly getting service interuptions, even if I am not moving at all and am in an area with 5 signal bars. I experience this problem no matter where I travel to-- it will either not connect at all with "GPRS is Temporary Unavailable", or it will disconnect with "an error occurred at the WAP gateway". Expect this to happen every 15-20 minutes for an hour, work perfectly for 6 hours, and then happen again.
- Price! They just came out with that $29.99/unlimited plan, so I haven't been able to switch over to it yet-- but before then it was something like $5/mb.
I know its suprising, but I did the math and there was no cost savings.
As you stated above.. $400 for a cisco VoIP phone. ComDial phones can be had for about $70. Lucent phones can be had for about $90. The phones my company was using with TeleVantage were about $120 each. I agree with you on those Siemens phones. Siemens seemed to be ridiculously overpriced... probably because they have such a strong European presence.
Wiring the cat.3 network when we were already running cat.6 cabling to the same locations was only a couple of thousand dollars difference when looking at an office with over 100 stations in it. If you take on average a $200 difference between an IP phone and a cat.3 phone, thats $20,000 more dollars with a full 100 stations, or $10,000 more dollars even if you start with just 50 stations like my company did.
I3 also has a really neat-o GUI. The 3com one isn't bad either.
In my office, the TeleVantage UI gets used by normal office users pretty much for voicemail only. It gets used in the call center for EVERYTHING though... We have it setup so calls coming in on different 800#'s (ANIs) appear differently in the que. We have it setup so that if the boss calls into customer service on his cell phone, it shows his name in the que so that customer service agents always pick up his call first (like if he's demoing how good our customer service is to someone), we use it to transfer calls from agent to agent, or from agent to supervisor, and we also use it most importantly for monitoring calls.
Security is defenitely an issue. Make sure to firewall your PBX and to disallow outbound calls from inbound trunks. This usually means disabling the "follow-me" setting that rings your cell phone when your office extension doesn't pick up.
Another simple precaution is making the number you dial for an outbound trunk something other than '9'. Or make '9' only available for local calls.
For instance in my company's system--
Dialing 9 goes to the 8 copper POTS lines we use for local calls and for when our T's go down. These lines don't have long distance service.
Dialing 4 goes to our 4 T1s that come in from our switch in LA.
Your local telco will try to sell you something called "centrex"-- which is basically them managing your phone system for you by partitioning off a section on their local class 5 switch.
This sucks because:
- You have to get your local telco to fix the problem whenever you have one... during business hours... whenever they feel like getting around to it.
- If you EVER want to change ANY settings, they have to do it for you... even little things like moving an extension from one office to another.
I think the only advantage of Centrex is that everyone has a DID (direct-inward-dial) number... but really if you want that, you can get that with any phone system.
If you tell them that you don't want centrex but still want a suggestion, you'll probably just end up with whoever their partner is. Remember they want to make money here, not help you.
Regarding the other suggestion above, that you call other companies customer service and ask them what they use-- Let me tell you what I've found from this in my own experience.
On the off chance that you get to talk to someone with technical expertise by calling into a huge company's customer service number, you may get a good idea of the user experience with the phone, but certainly not the management experience.
Also, it is not a good idea to pick your system based on taking a poll of what other companies are using for their call centers. In MANY large organizations (as the commentor correctly stated), the phone system is a very lucrative contract that goes to some VP's nephew who is a rep for Avaya or something with hardly any research. In other cases, when a company (say, American Express) goes out and buys themselves a phone system even with a lot of research, you have to understand that 1) they have a lot more bargaining power than you do, and 2) their needs are far different from yours... even if it seems like the same application.
As for magazines... try "Call Center". Its one of the better industry journals, but I didn't really find it all too helpful when I had to find a phone system for my company.
Agreed. Make sure to keep TV (or really any network PBX) far behing the firewall. These systems are not deisgned to be bulletproof, and you will have to patch them like any other server.
Regarding the voicemail notifications-- I believe this is a standard feature in TV. You can just turn it off in the administrator tool if you don't want to use it. And TV is designed with Outlook Integration in mind, so yeah... MS formats.
One of the nice things about those sound files is that it goes both ways. You can import voice prompts and even hold music from.WAV files.
I couldn't disagree more. In my research, I found that VoIP PBXs, even when putting in a new system from the ground-up, were not worth it. They all have voice quality problems (like echo), and the IP phones are much more expensive than wiring your building for Cat.3.
You should be forewarned that any advanced phone system requires constant supervision... More so than almost any other server. If it has features like Outlook integration, visual call management, etc... Expect to be adding/deleting users, helping people undelete messages from their voicemail box, resetting station IDs (especially in the win2k based systems) and changing the hold music as often as your upper management decides is neccesary.
About a year and a half ago, I did 3 months of research on a new phone system for both customer service and regular office users in my company. We wanted something that had every feature known to man (like voice prompts, announced hold times, visual call management, tracking software, database integration), but we were also on a tight budget-- in this case, around $70k for an intial roll-out of 50 stations.
I evaluated pretty much every system out there, from the "real" PBXs made by ComDial, NEC, Toshiba, and Lucent / Avaya, to the "soft" PBXs made by 3Com, Artisoft, Alcatel, and Interactive Intelligence... Bouncing features and quotes off of at least two dozen different sales agents.
The "real" PBXs that ran their own OS and didn't have Linux or Win2k at the core just couldn't compete with the features of their younger cousins from smaller companies. Of course the tradeoff was reliability. You could expect even a 10-year-old NEC PBX to keep running exactly the same, never crashing, pretty much until the end of time. However if you just had to have those features (like database integration, custom voice prompts, etc...) with 99.99999% uptime, I would have to be prepared to spend well over $150k... which I wasn't going to do.
I finally decided on TeleVantage for my company, and a year and a half later, we are still happy with this system. It does have it's problems though-- it's never exactly crashed, but it has had some mysterious slow-down issues that calls for a reboot about once every 3 weeks. We also had a database corruption that caused us to restore from a backup about a year after installation-- but all in all, its a fantastic system with every feature you could want.
As for the others in my final 3:
Interactive Intelligence was by far the system that impressed me the most out of all the ones that I looked at. It had even more features than TV (the ability to record EVERY call and store them in a seperate database for instance), but for the most part those two were very similar. Both had great Outlook integration. Both had visual call management. Both could do everything we wanted. Two things really set I3 apart from TV. First, they had the best design tool anywhere. Database integration, even with our PostgreSQL DB, required virtually no programming. You created call flows in the design tool like it was a flow chart in MS Project. The other thing that set I3 apart from TV was the price. I3 was about 50% more expensive than TV, and that was the only reason why I didn't go for it.
3Com NBX100 looked like a great system. One of it's best features was that it could support 200+ users on an IP network, making it unneccesary to wire our new building for both Cat.3 and Cat.6. Unfortunately, at the time, the $10k difference in wiring costs was still less than the difference in prices for 3Com IP phones vs. regular phones that use Cat.3. The NBX100 also had most of the features we were looking for... like visual call management, custom prompts, etc... But it couldn't do announced hold times (which was a requirement for me) without an expensive extra piece of hardware from a third party that would have doubled the price. Even doubled though, the price of the NBX100 system (which would have been around $35k for us) was still fairly competitive with what we were expecting to pay. However, I was unwilling to rely on an all-IP system. The NBX was still a new system at the time and it had been rumored to have echo and other voice quality issues. Of course the 3Com reps denied it, but I couldn't really take the chance.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't see anyone else post a link to it, so here it is:
Narnia.com
I agree that gift cards are sucky gifts-- but it at least is shows that you put SOME effort into it. If you give cash, thats just like saying "oh I don't really care but I know I had to give you something."
Gift Cards, Instant Phone Cards, Lotto Tickets, and the like are only recommended if you waited until the absolute last minute before gift shopping.
It is very ignorant to believe that only Americans have any management skills. Yes, I'm a manager. And programmers that my company has working in Eastern Europe are probably more efficiently managed than they are in the US. That place is run like a military base.
There are a couple of easy ones that I use and re-use every year always with good results:
In a hurry: Blockbuster Gift Card. Who doesn't go to Blockbuster? Geeks who use Netflix, right? Well stop trying to convert those poor ole simple folk and give them what they need-- a way to pay off that $15 3-day late fee. Another quick gift (if you are REALLY last minute) is an Instant Prepaid Phone Card. Some companies (NobelCom.com springs to mind) will even send out a gift e-mail along with the Access Number and PIN on whatever day the event is-- for instance, have it arrive on someone's birthday. This is a good gift for people who make a lot of International calls (think H1B workers and non-resident aliens), but other than that, you suck if you are so last minute that you have to buy an instant phone card as a gift.
Gourmet Food: Everyone likes to eat tastey things. Try iGourmet.com for a wide selection on everything from wine and cheese to curred ostrich, and try Dans.com for the best chocolates anywhere.
Flowers: Women love flowers. Gay men love flowers. Heck, little girls love flowers. I sent flowers to my 12-year-old niece for her birthday in October and she loved them! KaBloom.com consistantly has the best presentation when you open the box compared to 800flowers or FTD. Too bad their website is kinda hokey.
Designer Apparel: Nothing says "I know style" like a new pair of Gucci, Christian Dior, or Versace glasses. You can get these in stores everywhere (try Sunglass Hut and Solstice), or for the really good stuff, online at eyewearcentre.com. Beware discount vendors like 'EyeSave', and especially stay away from eBay. There are more fake designer glasses on eBay than there are fake Rolexes in a New York Street Vendor's cart-- and even though you probably can't tell, trust me, your mark can and will notice a fake. The most important things when picking designer apparel are: Get something from THIS SEASON'S COLLECTION. Getting last year's stuff on sale will NOT go over well. Make sure this is a color or style that looks ok on your mark. If you are clueless, look at that person's existing favorite clothes, glasses, etc. for reference. For glasses: make sure that you get the right shape for that person's face type. Again, if clueless, look at that person's existing stuff, or see this nice chart.
>>>if dealing with programmers overseas is more appealing to the bottom line, why not let your programmers work from home for 50-80% of their current in-office pay?
Because programmers overseas work for less than 10% what current in-office American programmers work for, and there are no benefits or American legal entanglements to worry about.
A PhD programmer with a western education and 5 years of experience in a former soviet block country will VERY happily work for USD$700/month. A somewhat less experienced programmer in the same country will very happily work for $450/month...
So look at it from your employer's point of view: Get rid of 1 high priced American programmer or IT specialist or whatever, lose all the legal HR worrying, and replace that person with 10 eastern europeans (or Indians for that matter).
Now thats not to say that there aren't some drawbacks... For instance, there will be communications problems, both with language and with culture. You will also typically be restricted to meetings via video-conferencing and not having your emails answered for 12+ hours due to tomezone differences. But I think I can live with that for a 10-times inrease in performance. Wouldn't you?
I have abour 200 domains that I administer for my company. Most of them are in 1 DomainDirect account, but there are a bunch spread out over 5 or 6 different registries.
The best solution that I've come up with so far is to have all of the domain registrars use the same email address (in this case admin@mydomain.com) which I use ONLY for contact with the registrars, and I put it under a very heavy spamfilter rating.
Then the only problem is that I have to remember to check that email account once a week or so.
Jared
not allowing laptops isnt an option. some users need mobile connectivity as part of their work.
As for putting these users in a DMZ or requiring updates every morning... That would require all users to come in 25 minutes early and also a much larger IT staff just to do the updates. That would be too expensive really.
As for anti-virus scanners... We use TechData and Norton Corporate, but you know some of those worms and viruses just seem to find their way around them. For instance, I've got Norton doing an update once daily on my home machine, and I still got the Blaster virus thanks to my not patching soon enough.
well per your suggestion...
If every laptop user had to be subjected to virus scans and patches every day, everyone would have to come in 25 minutes earlier for work every day, plus we'd need to have a much larger IT staff. This would be far more costly than what it costs us to clean up a toxic virus spill 3 times per week.
This kind of solution wouldn't really work as there are many users who bring a laptop in every day and need to have access to Exchange, the File Server, our CRM software, etc. I'm not talking about visitors to the office (who we actually can keep on a DMZ), but about regular team members.
>> 1.) Use a firewall to block unnecessary access from the external network
Really this doesn't work as well as you'd think. If you have laptop users on your network, which nearly everyone does, its analagous to wearing a plastic bubble suit but having unprotected sex with strangers every weekday morning.
My office has about 60 users in it and is protected by PIX firewalls and techdata's email virus scanner. We have about 20 Windows servers in our server room (this doesn't include the many dozens of servers running Linux or Solaris, or the machines at one of our 3 colo sites), and we patch them all about once a month. Office workstations are forced to patch themselves weekly through a distributed Windowsupdate. So yeah, this should be pretty safe, right?
Well about 3 times per week some user brings in a laptop, plugs it in to the LAN, and we get some new worm running around the office LAN.
How true!
A recent example...
Bank of America recently updated the software on their ATMs in Southern California. Now when you first put your card in, insted of asking for your PIN, it says something to the effect of (in all caps mind you):
"BANK OF AMERICA HAS RECENTLY UPDATED THIS ATM TO MAKE IT EASIER TO USE. SOME OF THE BUTTONS THAT YOU MAY BE USED TO PRESSING NOW ARE IN DIFFERENT LOCATIONS. PRESS ANY BUTTON TO CONTINUE."
So I go and press the biggest button on there, which happens to be the "cancel" button, and it spits out my card forcing me to start over again.
Well its not Mars but does that really matter if the audience is under 10? As I recall, Gumby gets taken prisoner by the moon people...
Gumby's Trip to the Moon
ABIT SecureIDE
Nowadays, information security has become a major concern with all kinds of end users, as most documents are now stored electronically. Business and personal files must be kept safe from unwanted intruders. ABIT has had a lot of experience in the field of data protection for motherboards: We were the first company to adopt RAID as a standard specification of all motherboards, beginning in 2001. This initiative was welcomed by end-users and media, and it also soon became an industry standard.
ABIT listened to users who were asking for information security. In July 2003, we are the first company to introduce this feature on our motherboards. Secure IDE is a device that connects to your IDE hard disk and has a special decoder key; without this key, your hard disk cannot be opened by anyone. Thus hackers and would be information thieves cannot access your hard disk, even if they remove it from your PC. Protect your privacy and keep anyone from snooping into your information. Lock down your hard disk, not with a password, but with hardware encryption. A password can be cracked by software in a few hours. ABIT?s SecureIDE will keep government supercomputers busy for weeks and will keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files forever.
How to Use ABIT?s Secure IDE to Protect your Information/Data?
SecureIDE is a encryption device that uses the eNOVA X-Wall chipset that ensures confidentiality and privacy of your data through disk encryption. When booting up your system, go to DOS and implement the FDISK instruction. This instruction will make a partition to format the Hard Disk to accept the secure IDE key. After this procedure, there are no more extra steps to perform besides using the key to ?open? the hard disk each time you boot up your system.
Nowadays it is necessary to have information security no matter what field your data comes from: business, scientific, government or copywrite protection. Only Secure IDE can protect you data and your privacy.
OpenSWF.org
"OpenSWF.org is the source for information on the Flash File Format. Here you will find file format specifications, sample code, links to 3rd party tools and more.
SWF is the file format used by Macromedia Flash to deliver graphics, animation and sound over the Internet. Almost 95% of web users can view SWF content without having to install a new plug-in, and over 300 million people have downloaded the Flash player. Macromedia published the specifications for SWF in April 1998. This site has resources for programmers who want to read, write or play SWF files."
I've been using T-Mobile's GPRS Internet service for about 7 months now on my Sony-Ericsson P800 phone/PDA.
Good Points:
- Very good coverage area. I've driven up and down the California coast from San Diego to Lake Tahoe and I can get at least SOME connectivity in every town. I also had no problems in South Florida. I think this is because T-Mobile is one of the few big companies that doesn't have 1 iota of its own network in the USA (they are owned by German Telekom afterall), and they have coverage agreements with Cingular, SprintPCS, etc... which works pretty much everywhere.
- Fast download speeds. I don't know about the 56k quoted in the article. I typically get much faster download speeds more along the lines of what you'd expect with a bad cable connection.
-You get access to both the T-Mobile WAP stuff, and regular Internet access with a real IP address, etc. Also T-Mobile has quite a nice image-compressing web proxy with user configurable options to speed things along for you.
Bad Points:
- Either GPRS technology is incredibly unreliable, or T-Mobile has some serious problems with their infrastructure. I am constantly getting service interuptions, even if I am not moving at all and am in an area with 5 signal bars. I experience this problem no matter where I travel to-- it will either not connect at all with "GPRS is Temporary Unavailable", or it will disconnect with "an error occurred at the WAP gateway". Expect this to happen every 15-20 minutes for an hour, work perfectly for 6 hours, and then happen again.
- Price! They just came out with that $29.99/unlimited plan, so I haven't been able to switch over to it yet-- but before then it was something like $5/mb.
http://wwwi.reuters.com/images/mdf309627.jpg
now i can't imagine why any newspaper would be hesitant to post that picture. goate.cx part 2?...
I know its suprising, but I did the math and there was no cost savings.
As you stated above.. $400 for a cisco VoIP phone. ComDial phones can be had for about $70. Lucent phones can be had for about $90. The phones my company was using with TeleVantage were about $120 each. I agree with you on those Siemens phones. Siemens seemed to be ridiculously overpriced... probably because they have such a strong European presence.
Wiring the cat.3 network when we were already running cat.6 cabling to the same locations was only a couple of thousand dollars difference when looking at an office with over 100 stations in it. If you take on average a $200 difference between an IP phone and a cat.3 phone, thats $20,000 more dollars with a full 100 stations, or $10,000 more dollars even if you start with just 50 stations like my company did.
I3 also has a really neat-o GUI. The 3com one isn't bad either.
In my office, the TeleVantage UI gets used by normal office users pretty much for voicemail only. It gets used in the call center for EVERYTHING though... We have it setup so calls coming in on different 800#'s (ANIs) appear differently in the que. We have it setup so that if the boss calls into customer service on his cell phone, it shows his name in the que so that customer service agents always pick up his call first (like if he's demoing how good our customer service is to someone), we use it to transfer calls from agent to agent, or from agent to supervisor, and we also use it most importantly for monitoring calls.
Both of which you can change in the administrator tool...
Set the default mailbox password to whatever you want and disable outbound calls from inbound trunks (disable the follow-me setting).
Security is defenitely an issue. Make sure to firewall your PBX and to disallow outbound calls from inbound trunks. This usually means disabling the "follow-me" setting that rings your cell phone when your office extension doesn't pick up.
Another simple precaution is making the number you dial for an outbound trunk something other than '9'. Or make '9' only available for local calls.
For instance in my company's system--
Dialing 9 goes to the 8 copper POTS lines we use for local calls and for when our T's go down. These lines don't have long distance service.
Dialing 4 goes to our 4 T1s that come in from our switch in LA.
Ack! Nooooo!
Your local telco will try to sell you something called "centrex"-- which is basically them managing your phone system for you by partitioning off a section on their local class 5 switch.
This sucks because:
- You have to get your local telco to fix the problem whenever you have one... during business hours... whenever they feel like getting around to it.
- If you EVER want to change ANY settings, they have to do it for you... even little things like moving an extension from one office to another.
I think the only advantage of Centrex is that everyone has a DID (direct-inward-dial) number... but really if you want that, you can get that with any phone system.
If you tell them that you don't want centrex but still want a suggestion, you'll probably just end up with whoever their partner is. Remember they want to make money here, not help you.
Regarding the other suggestion above, that you call other companies customer service and ask them what they use-- Let me tell you what I've found from this in my own experience.
On the off chance that you get to talk to someone with technical expertise by calling into a huge company's customer service number, you may get a good idea of the user experience with the phone, but certainly not the management experience.
Also, it is not a good idea to pick your system based on taking a poll of what other companies are using for their call centers. In MANY large organizations (as the commentor correctly stated), the phone system is a very lucrative contract that goes to some VP's nephew who is a rep for Avaya or something with hardly any research. In other cases, when a company (say, American Express) goes out and buys themselves a phone system even with a lot of research, you have to understand that 1) they have a lot more bargaining power than you do, and 2) their needs are far different from yours... even if it seems like the same application.
As for magazines... try "Call Center". Its one of the better industry journals, but I didn't really find it all too helpful when I had to find a phone system for my company.
Agreed. Make sure to keep TV (or really any network PBX) far behing the firewall. These systems are not deisgned to be bulletproof, and you will have to patch them like any other server.
.WAV files.
Regarding the voicemail notifications-- I believe this is a standard feature in TV. You can just turn it off in the administrator tool if you don't want to use it. And TV is designed with Outlook Integration in mind, so yeah... MS formats.
One of the nice things about those sound files is that it goes both ways. You can import voice prompts and even hold music from
I couldn't disagree more. In my research, I found that VoIP PBXs, even when putting in a new system from the ground-up, were not worth it. They all have voice quality problems (like echo), and the IP phones are much more expensive than wiring your building for Cat.3.
You should be forewarned that any advanced phone system requires constant supervision... More so than almost any other server. If it has features like Outlook integration, visual call management, etc... Expect to be adding/deleting users, helping people undelete messages from their voicemail box, resetting station IDs (especially in the win2k based systems) and changing the hold music as often as your upper management decides is neccesary.
About a year and a half ago, I did 3 months of research on a new phone system for both customer service and regular office users in my company. We wanted something that had every feature known to man (like voice prompts, announced hold times, visual call management, tracking software, database integration), but we were also on a tight budget-- in this case, around $70k for an intial roll-out of 50 stations.
I evaluated pretty much every system out there, from the "real" PBXs made by ComDial, NEC, Toshiba, and Lucent / Avaya, to the "soft" PBXs made by 3Com, Artisoft, Alcatel, and Interactive Intelligence... Bouncing features and quotes off of at least two dozen different sales agents.
My conclusion:
Best Features available ANYWHERE without completely breaking the bank: Interative Intelliengce I3 Phone System
Best Bang for your buck: Artisoft Televantage
Runner Up: 3Com NBX100
The "real" PBXs that ran their own OS and didn't have Linux or Win2k at the core just couldn't compete with the features of their younger cousins from smaller companies. Of course the tradeoff was reliability. You could expect even a 10-year-old NEC PBX to keep running exactly the same, never crashing, pretty much until the end of time. However if you just had to have those features (like database integration, custom voice prompts, etc...) with 99.99999% uptime, I would have to be prepared to spend well over $150k... which I wasn't going to do.
I finally decided on TeleVantage for my company, and a year and a half later, we are still happy with this system. It does have it's problems though-- it's never exactly crashed, but it has had some mysterious slow-down issues that calls for a reboot about once every 3 weeks. We also had a database corruption that caused us to restore from a backup about a year after installation-- but all in all, its a fantastic system with every feature you could want.
As for the others in my final 3:
Interactive Intelligence was by far the system that impressed me the most out of all the ones that I looked at. It had even more features than TV (the ability to record EVERY call and store them in a seperate database for instance), but for the most part those two were very similar. Both had great Outlook integration. Both had visual call management. Both could do everything we wanted. Two things really set I3 apart from TV. First, they had the best design tool anywhere. Database integration, even with our PostgreSQL DB, required virtually no programming. You created call flows in the design tool like it was a flow chart in MS Project. The other thing that set I3 apart from TV was the price. I3 was about 50% more expensive than TV, and that was the only reason why I didn't go for it.
3Com NBX100 looked like a great system. One of it's best features was that it could support 200+ users on an IP network, making it unneccesary to wire our new building for both Cat.3 and Cat.6. Unfortunately, at the time, the $10k difference in wiring costs was still less than the difference in prices for 3Com IP phones vs. regular phones that use Cat.3. The NBX100 also had most of the features we were looking for... like visual call management, custom prompts, etc... But it couldn't do announced hold times (which was a requirement for me) without an expensive extra piece of hardware from a third party that would have doubled the price. Even doubled though, the price of the NBX100 system (which would have been around $35k for us) was still fairly competitive with what we were expecting to pay. However, I was unwilling to rely on an all-IP system. The NBX was still a new system at the time and it had been rumored to have echo and other voice quality issues. Of course the 3Com reps denied it, but I couldn't really take the chance.
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