It's no secret that Hosted PBX technology has a robust set of advanced features that literally makes a tradional PBX as obsolete as a rotary dial telephone. Putting these advanced features to work will streamline your business processes, increase customer satisfaction and increase your revenues. Just as importantly, these features can provide you with a major strategic advantage over your competition.

As an added bonus, activation and changes to these features can easily be administed by your employees by using an easy-to-use, intuitive web browser. With a traditional PBX, you would have to pay the provider or your own technician to perform these changes for you and probably have to wait several days for the changes to be completed.

Here are just a few of the features available, how you can use them, and why they are important to your business:

Simultaneous Ringing - Simultaneous Ringing acts like a personal locator and makes it easy for people to find you. You can set up to 10 phone numbers to all ring at the same time when someone calls your main phone number. You can answer the call on any of the ringing phones. This makes contacting you easier than ever since callers only have to dial one number to reach you. Bottom line, there is less chance of missing important calls, and allows your inside and outside sales force to generate more revenue and more profit!

Remote Office - Through an easy-to-use Web-based portal, you can assign your office phone number to any phone in the world. So if you're traveling in London, you can set you hotel phone to ring when someone calls your office phone number. And making calls from your hotel phone will look to your callers like you're calling from your office. This feature can put your sales force, virtual office workers, and traveling executives within easy reach when a special call must be completed.

Auto Attendant - Present a more professional image to callers and reduce the need for a full-time receptionist with our Auto Attendant. Incoming calls to your main number are answered by our Auto Attendant, which is fully customizable according to your specifications. Dial by name directories and "0?-out to Operator options are standard. The Auto Attendant gives your company a professional, Big Business image.

Online Call Manager - Using a web-based portal allows you to dial, manipulate, and transfer calls on your computer, as well as configure and change your personal call handling settings. This feature allows you to adjust to changing business needs on the fly without having to send in a service request and then wait days before the change is made. In today's business environment, worker and process flexibility enhances your compeitive edge.

Visual Voicemail - Listen, forward and archive your voicemails just like you handle email. In addition to receiving voicemails on your telephone, a copy of each voicemail message is forwarded to your Email inbox as an audio file. This feature allows you to visually scan your voicemail box for the most important message. With a traditional PBX you would have to call your voice mail and sequentially listen to the header of each and every message, a time-consuming process. With Hosted PBX voicemail, you can also forward messages people outside of your Hosted PBX system using email so that you can share valuable first hand information with your suppliers, affiliates, and other important business partners.

Other Basic Features- Each user also has a set of basic features that need no explanation. These are: unlimited local calling, unique phone number (DID), Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, Do Not Disturb, Last Number Redial, and Caller ID.

Depending on your business, here are a few optional features you might want to also consider.

Soft Attendant Console - This optional computer application replaces the need for a bulky receptionist module. This optional feature provides the receptionist with a visual representation of every employee so they can see instantly who's on the phone and who's not. Transferring calls is easy - just click and drag.

Plus, since the application is accessed over the Internet, your receptionist can handle calls from any location . This not only gives you hiring flexibility, it also is a major advantage in the event a natural or man-made disaster occurs at your main business location and preserves the continuity of revenue-producing communications to and from your business.

Call Center - The optional Call Center application is a powerful, but inexpensive tool that allows businesses to tie together employees across multiple locations under one unified call center. Incoming calls are held in queue and routed to the next available agent - no matter where they are! Nightly reporting is available on both the agent and overall group level showing average hold time, average time spent per call, number of minutes an agent was check-in/ check-out, plus other critical management features.

Call center is a money-saving option that provides you with the flexibility to easily assemble a full-featured call center utilizing remotely deployed workers or office based workers, or a combination of the two. How would you like to have the option of using a virtual staff for all your call center needs or what about the need to bring in part-timers on the spur of the moment to handle promotional call volume spikes or for business continuity in the event of a disaster. A Hosted PBX can give you that flexibility.

If you are serious about taking employee productivity to the next level, then you should definitely consider the advanced feature sets offered in a VOIP Hosted PBX environment.

VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol has made a very noticeable change in the way that people and companies communicate with one another over long distances and the technology that is used is also gaining wider use and is attaining better standards because it is now a means of communicating that is becoming more widespread by the day. Though there are many uses and advantages of using VoIP, it does not mean that there is no disadvantage of VoIP for there are a few that one should be aware of and which are more pronounced when it concerns making calls that involves more than a single caller to other caller scenario.

Need To Put Up With Annoyance

The fact is that when there is a disadvantage of VoIP, it can end up causing a lot of unwanted annoyance to the caller though thankfully the disadvantage of VoIP is not too many. Obviously, the greatest disadvantage of VoIP is that the quality of service is not as good as what one would normally get when using the traditional phone. There are a number of reasons why this is the case and among them is the need for VoIP to send and receive significant amount of data that must be compressed and uncompressed respectively while the time required to do so is very little, and if the process of compressing and decompressing takes longer than permissible time frames, the quality of conversation will deteriorate causing problems such as echo and maybe even over-talk.

When you are talking over a conventional telephone, you can expect time delays of about ten milliseconds at the most, though in the case of VoIP, the delay could take as long as four hundred milliseconds which is certainly a major disadvantage of VoIP. Nevertheless, such a disadvantage of VoIP can be tolerated if the caller happens to be using free services and is also making an individual or personal call. However, when there are many users including businesses that wish to use VoIP, the problem gets out of hand since networks need to firewall the calls and often the firewall cannot detect which phone the call is to be routed to which can cause a major headache.

However, once you are using VoIP is it for personal calls or for business use, the disadvantage of VoIP can usually be ignored since they are not serious enough to warrant giving up their use, and given the fact that these calls do not cost anything, users will still stick with VoIP and will hope that in the long term newer technologies will emerge that will even take care of any disadvantage of VoIP to make its use troublefree and productive as well.

Voice over Internet Protocol or VOIP is a way of making and recording telephone conversations using the Internet. This is indeed a far cry from the days when one had to book long distance calls through operators. Direct dialing became a reality towards the end of the last century, but even bypassing a switchboard and a telephone exchange, does not match the economy and convenience of VOIP. Convergence of cellular telephones and the Internet have potentials for further breakthroughs as far as VOIP is concerned. The technology has unprecedented benefits for both work and leisure. Countries with cheap and fast Internet connections hardly need traditional telephones any longer.

It would be most unusual to find people today who do not use the Internet at all. Computers have become almost ubiquitous appendages of modern lives, and Internet connections through satellites revolutionize the ways in which we can stay in touch with colleagues, friends, and with the world at large. VOIP lets us send and to receive sound inputs through the Internet. Since most connections have fixed rentals, it implies that we can speak to others free of any incremental costs. It is also possible to conduct conferences with multiple individuals at remote locations, thus saving on both travel times and costs. VOIP can also be used to leave messages for anyone who is not online at a particular point of time.

VOIP Pitfalls

VOIP, for all its benefits and advantages, must be used with care. It will not work well if the party at the other end of a call does not have a broadband connection. Capacities for smooth transmissions of conversations in real time can also be affected by server capacities, and the numbers of people involved   Moreover, VOIP tends to be much heavier on Internet usage than text. This can be an issue for subscriptions with relatively limited transmission amounts. Parties who you call habitually, or with who you make very long calls, should not end up with huge bills from their Internet service providers. It is only courteous to check on this aspect before using VOIP extensively to converse with anyone.

Awareness that an Internet call costs nothing can lead to people using up line capacities unnecessarily. Employees have always been suspect of abusing office telephones to make personal calls, and this risk may be accentuated through a VOIP facility. Even when calls are made from personal Internet connections, or for official purposes on business Intranets, it is important to keep the value of time in mind! While VOIP calls and messages can be kept away from prying ears, it is a technological fact that all transactions can be traced to the computers involved. Anonymity or conversations off the record are actually impossible through this system, which for people with genuine intentions, can only be an advantage!