Working from Home

[bombaytelecom]

With the current Swine flu Scares my company is currently looking into some of our users working from home and i have be asked to look into the Telephony side of things i have had a few ideas already. At the moment we are only looking to test a few things to see if it will work for our business so we are looking at trialing this with a minimal expense at all.

we have a Team of 6 users which are we are going to use as our test case, we are also going to look at how this could help us in reducing the cost of our ever increasing headcount and how we could start hot desking.

1. we have 3 desks with 2 handsets on each desk, each user has the ability to forward their phones externally which would enable to them to forward their extenion and ddi to their mobile or their home telephone number. This is one option but it means having 2 handsets on one desk which doesnt save in the expense of handsets / infrastructure implementation

2. is there anyway of having an extension number / ddi number that doesnt have to have a physical handset (similar to phantom TN's or even using DMI tables or CDN's?

3.Could we have one handset on each desk with 2 line on that one handset and the users able to indivdually enable call forward on each line?

At the moment this is all i can think of, obviously there is who has the cost of the calls to come into later on down the line, but that is not a concern at the moment.

Meridian Option 61C
Symposium v 4.5
NICE Dictaphone Recording

 

[Johnthephoneguy]

You can set up an ACD or a phantom set to forward one of your DID's to a cell phone. Doing it this way is not user friendly (the user cannot forward and unforward the line) but it does not require a physical set.

JohnThePhoneGuy

"If I can't fix it, it's not broke!

 

[GHTROUT]

With Remote Call Forward, you might be able to solve some issues...unless there is an ACD queue involved.

http://www.ghtrout.com/rdr/rcf.html

[©] GHTROUT.com [⇔] A Variety of Free Resources for Nortel Meridian/CS1000 System Administrators

 

[allenmac]

Symposium has a hotdesking feature built into it. It's been a while since I worked on this release, but in the Agent definition there is a field for 'hotelling or hotdesk', or something similar where you enter their DN (I'm a little fuzzy on the details - sorry).

I believe the way the feature works is that you program a phantom TN for every agent, then when that agent logs into Symposium, the phantom is redirected to the DN on their station. This feature was specifically designed to allow large call centers to minimize their equipment costs when running multiple shift call centers.

If you couple this with Network wide virtual office, it may fit your needs.

 

[bombaytelecom]

Thanks for your responses.

John - From what you have told me i think that idea will be straight out of the window as we want to try and make it a seamless operation.

GHTROUT - Thanks for the link, i have had a look into this and just need to play around with it a little to get it to work/ me understanding it properly.

Allenmac - That sounds like it could be something that we would want to implement into our call centre's as it is how ever this might be quite expensive as we have OTM Navigator which requires licenses for each individual TN and this would probably just double that licence count :-(

Any other suggest would greatfully be received.

Meridian Option 61C
Symposium v 4.5
NICE Dictaphone Recording

 

[johnpoole]

you could look at the ip side. the users are usually going to need lan access anyway.. add a soft phone to there laptop.

john poole
bellsouth business
columbia,sc

 

[pbxn]

JP is right, soft phone is the way to go. Extension can work on the desk and on the softphone as well, its about as seemless as it gets. We have multiple users set up this way

 

[bombaytelecom]

Unfortunately we dont have an IP gateway on our meridian we are still on the ark and working with Analogue and digital phones over standard lines.

Meridian Option 61C
Symposium v 4.5
NICE Dictaphone Recording

 

[pbxn]

If the call forward/remote call forward isn't for you, theres an extender box that works fairly well. Its something like this

http://www.telecombiz.com/mck-extender-1000.html

 

[CTarv]

MCK works pretty well (we are IP enabled, but still use the MCK units we had deployed before we were IP enabled). About the only issue we've had with them (other than user bandwidth at home) is the occasional hardware failure with the individual units. Definitely a good option if you want them to have a digital phone at home.