Questions to ask your toll-free virtual pbx provider?

Choosing your virtual-pbx provider can become a daunting task if you are new to the concepts.

Below is a list of items you may wish to shop around before you finalize your service provider.

1.Virtual PBX Services: Many of the toll-free providers simply route the calls to a local number without presenting the various virtual pbx options such as call-hunt, follow-me, auto attendant, voicemail, dial-by-name, business hours greeting and non business hours greeting etc. Make sure these services are enabled and are provided free of cost to you.

2. Check for double-billing and cancellation charges: Most of them double bill and you may want to stay away from these providers. This will save you from surprises and hidden charges in future. Be sure to read the terms and conditions for hidden cancellation charges. They go as much as $100.

3. Auto-Attendant with voicemail: An auto attendant with an option to record your own voice as welcome greeting is a must for every business. 800PBX provides free greeting done by a professional artist.

4. Call-forwarding: Many providers forward calls however they are usually sent to your cell phone’s voicemail and not properly screened for a live person. 800PBX prompts for user input to avoid redirection to local voicemails.

Below is a list of items you may wish to shop around before you finalize your service provider.

1.Virtual PBX Services: Many of the toll-free providers simply route the calls to a local number without presenting the various virtual pbx options such as call-hunt, follow-me, auto attendant, voicemail, dial-by-name, business hours greeting and non business hours greeting etc. Make sure these services are enabled and are provided free of cost to you.

2. Check for double-billing and cancellation charges: Most of them double bill and you may want to stay away from these providers. This will save you from surprises and hidden charges in future. Be sure to read the terms and conditions for hidden cancellation charges. They go as much as $100.

3. Auto-Attendant with voicemail: An auto attendant with an option to record your own voice as welcome greeting is a must for every business. 800PBX provides free greeting done by a professional artist.

4. Call-forwarding: Many providers forward calls however they are usually sent to your cell phone’s voicemail and not properly screened for a live person. 800PBX prompts for user input to avoid redirection to local voicemails.

5. Call-blocking and custom greetings: Expect lot of spam calls and your provider should be able to give you an option to prevent calls from user-defined numbers.

800PBX allows you to play a recorded message for the calls coming from user-defined numbers. The system hangs up after playing a message. (”XYZ corporation does not entertain calls from this number. Please hang up and call us from a different number if required.”)

6. Call-recording: Your business may require you to record all calls in order to maintain call records and for quality-training purposes. 800PBX offers this feature free of cost.

7. Fax: With an ability to send and receive faxes on internet, you save few dollars in buying and maintaining fax machines.

8. Dedicated local number: Your business will expand in future and you should be ready to add more numbers from each state.

9. Once you choose a service provider, look out if he is a reseller or someone who rents or leases the toll-free numbers. It is wise to opt your toll-free number from a direct seller.

10. Online panel and extension login: Be sure to enquire about the online panel features and check if each extension user can create his or her own rules.

11. If you have a website, make sure your provider gives your online customers to call you directly using web dial feature. If you use email for your business, an option to contact you from your outlook signature would help.

800PBX provides all the above Features for less cost along with free minutes for Each plan. Please evaluate the services free of cost for two weeks. Good luck with your new provider and 800PBX looks forward to serving you.

About Author
Mark Richardson is an in-house writer for 800PBX Inc, the provider of Toll-Free Number with virtual-pbx Services. He is a regular reader and writer of business articles. View their website at: http://www.800pbx.com

Internet and Email

Internet and Email are increasingly important areas for organisations. This article highlights the main areas of interest for organisations looking at how they can benefit from the using the Internet and email.

Why get connected?

Connecting to the Internet will allow you better access to information and better communication with members and other partners through the use of email.Getting Connected To The Internet covers all the things you need to think about when getting yourself connected.

Internet access for your organisation is provided by an Internet Service Provider (ISP), the article Choosing An Internet Service Provider outlines what to look out for when choosing an ISP.

If your organisation does not have access to a BT landline there are alternative ways to connect to the Internet, these are covered by I Can’t Get Broadband - Help!

With the decrease in broadband prices over the last few years it is worth looking at what offers are available for Internet connections. The article Switching Broadband Provider takes you through the steps you need to follow, and outlines some of the pitfalls when trying to switch provider.

Using the Internet and email

Now connected, how are you going to use the Internet for communications? Before thinking about specific services it is important to consider how the outside world sees you. To have your own online identity you will need a domain name (e.g. yourorganisationname.org.uk) as the article

What's In A Domain Name? explains.

The Internet can be used to both promote your organisation and to as a source of information. For promoting your organisation have a look at the Your Website section of the Knowledgebase. The Using Your Computer section provides information on Finding Information On The Internet and What Is RSS?, these are key guides to help you find useful information on the Internet.
Email

You can use email in ways other than one-to-one communication with individuals:

* Email Lists, enabling you to send the same message to many people at once. See An Introduction To Email Mailing Lists
* Email Newsletters, can be used to by organisations of all sizes to communicate with supporters and raise your profile. To help you get the most out of Email Newsletters there are Best Practice guides for Building And Designing Email Newsletters and Sending Email Newsletters

Other uses

As well as the “traditional” use of the Internet there are a number of new emerging ways of using the Internet to communicate. Phone Calls Over The Internet?, and Reaching Out Through Mobile are excellent starting points for using these new applications of the Internet and telephony.

Security Issues

The Internet and email are valuable tools for organisations but there are potential security issues it is important to be aware of.

The articles How secure is the Internet and Advice by email – security issues outline the main threats and how to avoid them. For example Email is not secure and should not be used for sending confidential or sensitive information.

Spam (unsolicited email) is undoubtedly the single most annoying aspect of the Internet’s success. Spam is often used to transmit material that can cause security issues so needs to be managed. The articles Dealing With Spam and Spam - Solutions Anyone? help in recognising and dealing with spam.

Security is also covered in sections of the Knowledgebase (see the Security Starting Out article for an overview).

As well as the Knowledgebase articles on ICT Management, there is the Internet and Email Discussion Forum – this is a useful place to share knowledge, experiences, and ask questions.

For help getting started in other areas of ICT, see our index of Starting Out articles.

About the author

Lasa Information Systems Team
Lasa Information Systems Team provides a range of services to community and voluntary organisations including ICT Health Checks and consulting on the best application of technology in your organisation. Lasa IST is responsible for maintaining the ICT Hub Knowledgebase

If it weren't irreplaceable, e-mail would be intolerable. Spam and viruses are all a pain, but the biggest hassle with e-mail is simply managing the volume of it all.

Answer this, forward that, file the other thing -- then try to keep track of it all on more than one computer: It's like a checkbook that will never be balanced.

A big part of this problem is the way most people check their e-mail -- an old standard called Post Office Protocol, POP for short, that was developed for a far simpler time.

If we downloaded e-mail to only one computer, POP would still work. But between work and home computers and Web-mail options, it's easy to have three different routes to one inbox -- something POP was never designed for at all.

Trying to check a POP account from two computers is always a mess. If you download each e-mail to only one computer, you lose track of who sent you what.

But if you keep your messages on your Internet provider's computers until you've copied them to every machine you use, you can expect that mail server will eventually forget which messages you'd already retrieved, sending down fresh copies of every one and flooding your inbox with duplicates.

A better mail setup that solves those problems was developed over a decade ago and has been tested extensively since. But IMAP (pronounced "eye-map," it stands for "Internet Mail Access Protocol") suffers two flaws of its own: One is that most Internet providers don't offer it. The other is that most users don't know it exists.

I can't do much about the first thing, but this is my attempt to change the second.

Like POP accounts, IMAP allows you to use the e-mail program of your choice. Unlike POP (but much like Web-mail), IMAP gives you the ability to access all of your e-mail from wherever you log in, while also tracking what you've done with each message.

So you can check your e-mail from different places, yet never lose your place.

Log in from every computer you use, borrow a friend's e-mail program, or use a Web-mail interface -- and every time, you can pick up where you left off by seeing which messages you've read, replied to, forwarded, flagged for follow-up or filed away in their own folders.

You can even start writing a message on one computer and finish it on another, since an online Drafts folder is a regular feature. So is a Templates folder for your stationery.

Spam and viruses are easier to deflect, since your mail software can peek at each new message before downloading it, then wipe it off the server before it gets to stain your hard drive. But if your computer does get wiped out by a virus, you won't lose your e-mail from it.

This setup functions best over broadband connection, but since IMAP mail programs can automatically "mirror" your online folders on your hard drive, it works over dial-up too. Even if you can't get online, you can still see every message that had arrived when you last checked your mail -- unlike Web-mail.

Finally, when you do want to archive e-mail -- for example, when your account starts to bump up against its disk quota -- it's easy to move messages to a local folder on your computer for permanent storage.

The odds are that you've used something like this once before. America Online's mail system was built on similar principles, and it remains one of the company's biggest advantages over its competitors. (In one useful aspect, its ability to store your address book online puts AOL ahead of IMAP itself.)

Making use of IMAP means finding an amenable Internet access provider. AT&T Worldnet, Comcast, EarthLink, Juno/NetZero, SBC Yahoo and Verizon all offer only POP and Web-mail access.

The usual explanation is that consumers don't want IMAP, and it would cost too much to offer anyway.

"We haven't seen a large demand from the pure consumer segment," said Stephen Currie, EarthLink's director of product management, in an e-mail forwarded by the service's PR department. He also noted the added processing capacity and disk costs needed by IMAP, concluding, "I don't think it would be feasible to offer a mainstream free IMAP product."

Further down the food chain, however, many smaller providers are doing just that.

For example, three local firms, Silver Spring-based Atlantech, PatriotNet in Fairfax and Rockville's Heller Information Services, reported that anywhere from 15 percent to a third of their customers had switched to IMAP.

What's particularly impressive about those numbers is that two of these firms barely mention their IMAP support on their own Web sites. That's typical; you'll probably have to ask your own provider if it offers this option.

Should your provider be so enlightened, switching to IMAP will involve noting the change in your e-mail program's setup screen.

The quality of your software, however, may be an issue in its own right. Two of the most widely used mail applications, Microsoft's Outlook and Qualcomm's Eudora, suffer from strangely sloppy IMAP support. The Mozilla browser's mail component, Apple's Mail program for Mac OS X and Microsoft's Outlook Express work better -- but even then, little defects such as Mail's habit of creating a "Sent Items" folder instead of using the standard "Sent" folder for outgoing messages can lead to confusion.

But these problems should all be solved in the usual course of development; someday, every e-mail account will work like this. Until then, IMAP should be on your shopping list the next time you look for an Internet service.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10089-2004Mar20.html

Music industry threatens ISPs over piracy

The music industry opened up a new front in the war on online music piracy yesterday, threatening to sue internet service providers that allow customers to illegally share copyrighted tracks over their networks.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, said it would take action against internet companies that carry vast amounts of illegally shared files over their networks. It stressed that it would prefer not to pursue such a strategy and is keen to work in partnership with internet providers.

John Kennedy, the chairman of the IFPI, said he had been frustrated by internet companies that have not acted against customers involved in illegal activity. He warned that litigation against ISPs would be instigated "in weeks rather than months". Barney Wragg, the head of EMI's digital music division, said the industry had been left "with no other option" but to pursue ISPs in the courts.

The IFPI wants ISPs to disconnect users who refuse to stop exchanging music files illegally. Mr Kennedy said such activity is in breach of a customer's contract with the ISP and disconnecting offenders the IFPI had identified would significantly reduce illegal file sharing.

Mr Kennedy said talks with internet companies have been ongoing over the past year, but no action has been taken. "I realised I was being filibustered ... if they still want to filibuster, their time will run out," he said.

The IFPI took legal action against 10,000 individuals in 18 countries during 2006. It won a spate of significant legal victories against peer-to-peer platforms such as Kazaa that was forced to pay a $115m (£58m) settlement.

A spokesman for the Internet Service Providers Association said ISPs are "mere conduits of information" that can not be held liable for offences committed by customers. "ISPs cannot inspect every packet of data transmitted over their networks," he said.

Geoff Taylor, the executive vice-president and general counsel of IFPI, said that ISPs are in the best position to stop copyright infringements. "While it might be possible to argue that an ISP is exempt from liability for damages, that does not mean rights holders can't obtain an injunction to stop infringements of their copyright," he said.

A spokeswoman for Tiscali, a UK ISP, said the onus is on the IFPI to prove that the user is engaged in illegal activity and that the music organisation should share the cost of resolving disputes. Last year, due to a lack of evidence, Tiscali refused to close the accounts or hand over the details of 17 customers who the British Phonographic Industry claimed were involved in illegal file sharing.

During 2006, global digital music sales doubled to about $2bn on the back of an 89 per cent surge in music downloads to 795 million. The success of the digital music market has been underlined by bands like Koopa which is expected to score a Top-40 hit this week despite having no record label or any physical copies of their CD on sale.

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article2162919.ece