Business Info - issue 138

COVER STORY 01732 759725 magazine 11 are added. “In its current format, it covers a large percentage of customer requirements, and that is only going to grow as we add more things to it. Video conferencing is not yet something we deploy as a feature on the system, so if a customer has a need for it we will sell them 3CX, which does webRTC. But we will come to video conferencing at some point,” he said. Easy self-management Two areas of the new system that Spitfire has devoted a great deal of attention to are the user interface and the administrator console, both of which have been designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind. Based on feedback from its own employees, Norton is confident that it has created a solution that provides the intuitive ease of use demanded by a new generation of office workers that doesn’t want to spend time working out how to use a phone system. “Spitfire moved over to the new system in March and people say they find it much easier to use. They really appreciate things like the ability to assign names to buttons on the phone, so you don’t have to dial by extension number, and the alphanumeric keypad, which dynamically presents names from an address book as you type, just like on a mobile.With our old system, you had to scroll down a list to find the person you wanted to call.We have tried to translate that mobile experience to make it easy to use,” he said. This extends to the administrator console, which is laid out very logically and through which customers can easily control all aspects of the system, should they wish to do so, with support from Spitfire when required. A fully managed service, at no additional charge, is available for customers that prefer Spitfire or one of its resellers to handle day-to-day system management. “With some traditional solutions you pay to go on a special course, but we have made this as easy to self- manage as possible,” explained Norton. “Phones are sent out fully configured, but after that the user can log on and make adds, moves and changes without having to call up their supplier or change the features on the buttons. They can do things like change who’s in a ring group and the order of answering phones; configure the auto attendant feature; create call centre groups; set up call flows to route calls to different destinations depending on the time of day or day of week; view call statistics down to an individual user level – all via easy to use drop-down menus.” Because administrators can provide different levels of access, they can enable end users to do things like set up call diverts to a home number/mobile phone or log-on at someone else’s extension but restrict access to more advanced settings and capabilities. Reliability and security Another important design requirement was reliability and security, which is why only Yealink phones are being supplied with the solution. “When we launch a phone system, it’s really important that everything works and is rock solid from end-to-end, and the easiest way to achieve this is to sell it with the Yealink series of handsets, which are fully tested and which we use with all the other phone systems we do. If we supply everything from day one, we know we have full control over it,” explained Norton. “The other key thing from a reliability perspective is the way we have deployed it on the core network. We have inherent reliability on the virtual server infrastructure we have built and, as a SIP provider, we have built reliability and resilience into our SIP network nodes as well.We have different back-up gateways in different geographic areas, so if something did fail in one of our network nodes it would auto failover to another – for inbound and outbound calls, which many vendors can’t do. That’s provided as standard in the phone system, without any additional cost.” For small and medium-sized businesses, a cloud hosted telephony solution offers many advantages, from a high-end feature set to flexible deployment and no upfront costs.With Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1, there has never been a better time to move your voice to the cloud. www.spitfire.co.uk User Configurable Call Routing Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1 System Features n Web-based management console n Call management/routing (e.g. call transfer, forward, hold, park/pickup) n Auto attendant/Digital receptionist n Call queuing & management statistics n Music on hold n Voicemail including email notifications n Call twinning (ringing deskphone and mobile simultaneously) n Softphone integration n Programmable buttons on handset/ softphone n Group contact directory n Multi-user conference call bridge