While mobile phones, PDAs and landlines allow workers to stay connected with the office, often they cannot synchronize those devices with one preset number that works through the company's PBX system. This means that callers need to try various numbers to reach a person or that they must leave a voice mail and hope that the recipient returns the call in a timely manner.

Many companies use a traditional on-site PBX, but when mobile professionals need to be connected, setting up a system to handle remote offices and mobile workers can be complex and costly. Most PBX hardware only sends calls to phones that are physically wired to the PBX inside the same building.

One alternative is a hosted PBX system that delivers the functionality of a traditional on-site PBX but as a service. The subscriber does not buy the equipment and can use regular phones. Other than the cost savings, the key benefit of a hosted PBX is that it can make the office virtual by sending calls almost anywhere, enabling employees to work without constraints.

Employees can receive calls through the company's main business number whether they are working in the office, at home or on the road. The "follow me" feature allows calls to try several different numbers for each employee.

When a call comes into the sales department, for example, how is the call routed? Will the caller be forced to leave a voice mail if the first person the call is sent to is on the phone or out of the office, or will the call be routed to another representative?

An automatic call distribution (ACD) queue is a standard part of many sales organizations and call centers. ACD queues know, for example, which employees are working, which are already taking a call and which are on a break or out for the day. Calls are then routed immediately to an available agent instead of making the caller wait while different numbers are tried. If all agents are already busy, the caller can be given the option to wait for the next available agent.

In many hosted PBX environments, sales members can log themselves in and out of the ACD queue or have calls routed to mobile phones. Sales managers can choose how they want to route calls, whether based on skill level or on which sales person has been idle the longest amount of time. Policies can be set to identify who is calling and to route those calls to the appropriate sales representative, allowing the representative to know who is calling in advance.

Communications professionals often spend a lot of time maintaining and upgrading premise-based PBXs, or in managing the PBX vendor who provides the service and support. Expanding and upgrading the system also can be challenging.

A hosted PBX reduces upgrade costs and complexity, as the hosting company houses the equipment and is in charge of updating and expanding the technology to meet the needs of its subscriber base. In addition, hosted PBX systems can usually scale to any size. The service provider typically has many thousands of extensions spread across its client base, so adding an additional extension for your company does not tax the provider's bandwidth.

Another important consideration is possible downtime. If the power goes out, the traditional, hardware-based PBX system goes down. Because a hosted PBX service is always hosted at an off-site location, an outage at the customer site usually does not affect the phone service provider. Calls can still be taken on cell phones or at alternate locations using the follow-me/forwarding feature.

Sometimes a hosted PBX service can be used solely as a backup for existing hardware PBXs. Using a hosted PBX service in this way is usually less expensive than using it full time, and it is almost always cheaper than buying another piece of hardware to put on a shelf in case of an emergency.

When considering a hosted PBX, check that the technology allows for full-featured reporting. With some hosted PBX services, sales managers can print out phone logs for each sales representative to evaluate effective use of the team, or see graphical representations of call traffic through the day to know how best to staff for increased call traffic. Many services offer Web-based voice mail retrieval and control settings, allowing for access from anywhere.

There are two main types of hosted PBX technology available today, the standard hosted PBX and the hosted IP PBX. The standard hosted PBX normally accepts calls from and sends calls to any type of phone, anywhere. Usually, these systems involve some kind of per-minute fee for calls to cover the costs from the underlying phone carriers.

Hosted IP PBX services typically use voice over IP (VoIP) to send calls over the Internet to subscribers. This requires using only VoIP phones sold by the service provider and calls generally cannot go to cell phones or landlines. The tradeoff is that these services typically charge only a monthly flat rate for all calls, allowing better budgeting and control for companies with widely varying call traffic.

Call quality is also a consideration with hosted PBX services. Standard hosted PBX call quality will depend on the transmission medium. The highest quality phone calls come when the service sends calls across standard phone lines. Cell phones and VoIP phones will likely reduce call quality but give benefits in flexibility and/or cost.

Hosted IP PBX systems rely on Internet telephony and have the associated questions about reliability and quality. These can be improved by selecting the most suitable vendor and making sure the adopting company's own IP infrastructure is appropriate.

Greg Brashier is vice president of marketing for Virtual PBX, San Jose, Calif.

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Small business tries ASPs

Northshore Paralegal Services in Danvers, Mass., is a small business serving the Boston area with background screening for clients' potential hires and title abstracting for the mortgage industry. Last year, President Ted Lannon took note of a steady news stream of natural and man-made disasters and began feeling a little vulnerable about his company. The heart of his business-files, servers and applications-depended on the smooth and uninterrupted functioning of his software, hardware and physical infrastructure.

He also began to feel too thinly spread. With a seven-person staff, all IT and telecom maintenance and support fell on his shoulders. His answer: outsourcing the service firm's IT and telecom operations.

Lannon kept his office, but started moving his software and hardware maintenance burden out the door to application service providers (ASPs). The primary business ASP he chose was Oracle-based NetSuite. The phone system and service provider was Junction Networks, New York.

Out went the on-premise servers: one with e-mail and authentication; a second for general ledger and accounts payable; and all but one file server. Also off the wall and out the door: the phone system and extensions.

"I wanted to take my business and make it virtual," says Lannon. "I wanted to do away with office Quickbooks, where everyone had to go through the LAN. I wanted to do away with doing my own authentication. I shifted to the ASP model because I wanted fault tolerance in case of a disaster."

Lannon also wanted to provide his remote employees in Virginia with the same services they could use in the office. Lastly, he wanted to shed full responsibility for server and phone system maintenance without hiring more IT staff.

On the voice side, he exchanged the legacy system for some Polycom IP handsets. He disconnected all but one (for fax) of his service provider lines and replaced them and the existing phone system with Junction Networks' onSIP hosted IP PBX service.

With the DSL disconnected, Lannon now runs both voice and data over his broadband connection, with 10-MB download and 1.5-MB upload speeds. Because phone calls are all routed over IP, and applications are all browser-based, location has become almost irrelevant to his business.

"Not being tied to a physical location is fantastic," he offers. "If a disaster happens, I just work from home and send the insurance guys in to replace my equipment."

His employees can work from home, as well, with broadband, PC and a software or hardware SIP phone. Lannon keeps a redundant drive of the one file server on the premises in a fireproof box. If he ever wants to move his office, he just packs the phones and reconnects to the Internet; the phones register themselves to onSIP and the staff continues working as before.

"Some IP PBX hosts are hardware-software combos, where you plug a box in the office and coordinate between lines and SIP," Lannon explains. "I didn't want another device on my network. All changes should make my operation simpler and not more complex. Also, other companies wanted to charge per seat. Junction Networks basically charges per application and per minute. Paying for circuits was always painful, as well as all those ridiculous little fees."

Business continuity aside, Lannon has gained other benefits from onSIP. He now dials his seven extensions by two-digit numbers, including the one in Virginia. He can work at home without missing calls, since onSIP can ring two or more phones at once if they are registered to the same SIP number. He also likes getting voice mails in his e-mail box: "My e-mails hit me at home the same way they do in the office."

What about cost? "It's a significant discount," Lannon says. His monthly service provider bill once was between $400 and $600, he says, while he is spending about $100 now.

For more information from Junction Networks (click here)