Smoothstone Offers Awareness In the Cloud

The notion of the business telephone as the big black clunky thing that sits on your desk and tethers you with a curly cord is fast fading into history. Today’s business communications is often mobile and multidimensional, including chatting, instant messaging, file transfers, Web based applications and collaboration as well as conferencing. Is the venerable corporate PBX system still up to the task?

When the old phone system becomes a limitation to productivity, many companies now look to the clouds for answers. A major innovator in moving business communications to the cloud is Smoothstone IP Communications. Their VoiceMaxx cloud-based PBX platform goes beyond fixed mobile convergence to unify all types of communication, including text and voice. Now they’re making that system cloud aware.

The Smoothstone Awareness, Messaging and Presence (AMP) ties co-workers together through a cloud-based communications platform that knows the status of everyone in the system. No more guessing if one of your team members is available or not. Remember phone tag? That’s yesterday’s problem. AMP will instantly show you if someone is “free to chat”, “online” or “away.” It also knows if you are “on the phone” or have set your status to “do not disturb.”

Sounds a little like some of the instant messaging and social networking tools that you are already familiar with, doesn’t it? The problem with the popular public apps is that they were designed for the public and don’t contain the rigorous controls needed for corporate security and governance. Smoothstone establishes a private version of these popular apps within the VoiceMaxx cloud. AMP has the directory integration, encryption, chat logging and virus protection you need for corporate-wide deployment.

Consider today’s smartphone. It’s as much a mobile computing terminal as a telephone. If all you are concerned about is that you can call back to the office and get your voicemail messages, you are missing out on a lot of the productivity advantage of this tool. The ideal situation is that you have an integrated voice and data environment and that it stays with you no matter where you go.

Up until recently, the best that can be achieved is to carry both a cell phone and a laptop (now notebook or netbook) computer. That way you had access to both your computing environment and your business phone. BlackBerry was first to integrate voice and messaging into one device. Now iPhone and Android have taken over this function with much more emphasis on applications, especially cloud applications, as a way to integrate mobile and fixed office tools.

We’re crossing a threshold now, from a collection of ad-hoc solutions to a truly seamless system that incorporates everything you need into one unified system. The advantage is that all these things work together by design rather than by kludge and workaround. It’s natural that the integrated environment be powered from the cloud, since we rarely stay in one spot for long. Smoothstone’s VoiceMaxx is a big step forward in that direction and a look at how we’ll communicate in the future.

Have you outgrown your once adequate but now primitive PBX telephone system? Before rushing out and spending a small fortune to upgrade to a bigger and better box, take a close look at cloud communication solutions to see if they are a better fit and lower cost option.

SMB Cloud Computing Portfolio

Cloud computing has come to the enterprise in a big way, but how about the small to medium size businesses? Does anyone offer a portfolio of cloud services that make sense for these companies?

Just such a collection of integrated cloud services is now available from Broadview Networks. Broadview is a communications provider serving the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic United States. They offer a wide variety of connectivity that includes the popular T1 and bonded T1 lines, Ethernet over Copper, Metro Fiber Ethernet, MPLS networking, SIP Trunking and even POTS lines.

What makes Broadview Networks particularly interesting as a cloud services provider is that they already have the connectivity you need to get to the cloud. Many cloud computing companies offer only the infrastructure, platform or software as a service. It’s up to you to figure out how you’ll reliably connect to their cloud. Broadview can give you both the services and the high reliability connections that make it all work seamlessly.

Cloud communications, also called Hosted PBX, moves the telephone switching system and its network out of your facilities and to the service provider. Your handsets connect directly to your LAN, along with your PCs, printers and other network equipment. An advantage of Hosted PBX is that you don’t need the capital investment, maintenance and dedicated staff to have an enterprise phone system for your business. That’s all handled by the service provider.

Broadview Networks offers Hosted PBX for the SMB, but also has a new portfolio of cloud computing services. These include Hosted Business E-Mail, Office Anywhere, Hosted SharePoint, Cloud Backup and Recovery, and both Virtual and Dedicated Servers. All of these help you increase productivity without the traditional capital expenditures.

Broadview’s Hosted Business E-mail is a managed email solution that gives you enterprise-grade e-mail functions that include contacts, calendaring, notes, tasks and folders. If you wish, you can expand this functionality with Hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010 to gain shared contacts, cross-user tasks, distribution lists, group calendaring, plus archival, compliance and eDiscovery options. You control everything through an administrator portal that lets you quickly and easily add or delete e-mail boxes.

Office Anywhere uses Citrix 6.0 to virtualize your desktop environment so that user applications and data reside in the cloud. This is especially valuable for mobile workers and business with multiple locations, in that documents and applications can be accessed through a simple Web browser anywhere in the world. No need to worry about individual file backups. All data is automatically backed up in the cloud and easily recovered when needed.

Broadview’s Hosted Microsoft SharePoint 2010 helps your team collaborate in a secure real-time environment. That includes road warriors, home-based employees and remotely located colleagues. The SharePoint environment lets them collaborate and create as if they are all located in the same room. Team members can view, comment and edit the same document, speeding the process of document creation, review and revision.

Do you still want to maintain your own servers or create a hybrid public and private cloud with some of your own equipment augmented by on-demand cloud services? Either way, you need a robust backup and recovery system to protect your valuable business information files. Broadview’s Cloud Data Backup and Recovery gives you the ability to backup your data to a high performance data center in the cloud. You’ll have secure off-site disaster recovery and backup with on-demand provisioning of extra storage. In addition to backing up your mission critical servers, you can also backup up employee’s workstations and laptops from anywhere in the world. No need to worry about losing a laptop and its valuable data or suffering an untimely disk failure. Your data is easily recovered from the cloud so you can continue operations.

Broadview is also a colocation hosting services provider. They offer virtualized or dedicated servers secured in SAS 70 Type II-certified data centers. You have your choice of Windows or Linux operating systems running on HP and Cisco servers.

Have you been curious about what a move to the cloud can do for your business? Regardless of size, there are cloud services scaled to meet your needs. Check out pricing and availability for SMB cloud computing services now to assist your tradeoff analysis.



Note: Background cloud photo courtesy of NASA Goddard.

Job Posting Tool Offers Free Trial

It’s time to think about hiring again. Perhaps you are already in need of qualified candidates, but are none too anxious to wade into the snowstorm of resumes and phone messages that result when you run a job ad. Then there’s the cost of advertising and the dedication of staff time to screen applicants. The improving economy can seem like a mixed blessing unless you have a way to make the hiring process more efficient and less painful. Here’s one you should consider.


ZipRecruiter is in the business of improving the job posting and candidate review process. They have created an online-based system that takes a lot of the burden off you and your staff. If you like it enough to give it a test drive, you can try the system free for four days. Keep all the candidates you acquire during that trial period. If you want to continue with the product, pricing is very attractive.

What does ZipRecruiter do that’s easier than doing it all yourself? The leverage the power of automation to improve productivity. Sure, you can post to all the job boards online, one by one. ZipRecruiter will do that posting for you to the most highly trafficked free job boards on the internet. We’re talking a collection of resources that draws tens of millions of job seekers every month. You click once. your job gets posted to multiple boards.

Now brace yourself for the response. With the job market just recovering, there is a lot of excellent talent out there. There are also a lot of desperate, but unsuitable, candidates to vie for your attention. Don’t let the perfect matches get lost in the shuffle. One way to reduce resume spam is to ask your candidates real-world questions about your business. ZipRecruiter lets you set up an optional online interview so you can review candidate response along with the resumes they submit.

You’ll probably want collaboration with your colleagues before you commit to the time and expense involved with bringing someone in for a face to face interview. With the ZipRecruiter tool you can rate the candidates and share notes all in one place. There’s a tab to view the resume and another to quickly view the candidate's answers to your interview questions.

You know that social media is the way to connect these days. This tool has social networking capability built-in. It takes just a couple of clicks to spread the word about your job openings on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google Buzz.

This is a customizable job posting tool with a hosted company job page that promotes all of your job openings in one place. You can simply link to this page from your company website instead of having to build and maintain a completely separate job listing resource.

Want to manage your candidate data offline as well as online? No problem. ZipRecruiter makes it easy to export your candidate to an Excel spreadsheet.

Does this sound a lot easier than doing it all manually or coming up with your own proprietary tools? You bet it is. But why not decide for yourself by getting a free trial of ZipRecruiter right now? See how fast and easy it works for you. You probably won’t go back to the “old” way of posting jobs and evaluating candidates.

Browser Based Video Conferencing and Webinars

Video conferencing, once limited to the corporate environment, is now available to anyone with a broadband connection and web browser. MegaMeeting has a new suite of products available for PCs, MACs and Linux computers that don’t require the usual downloads and installations. If you can browse a website, you can participate in a video conference or webinar.

MegaMeeting’s web-based video conferencing system takes advantage of the Flash Player 9 plug-in that is already installed in most Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari browsers. If your computer has 256 MB of RAM and a 1.2 GHz or faster processor, it should work fine. You’ll also need an Internet connection with 240 Kbps bandwidth. That’s pretty much anything that dares to call itself broadband. In actuality, though, you’ll only be using 70 Kbps per video feed. Pretty easy requirements to meet, don’t you think?

A video camera isn’t required to be a participant, but if you have one, or can get a cheap one, you can be one of the 16 simultaneous video screens streaming in the conference. It’s just like one of those discussion shows on TV, but with a lot more screens. Unlike many competing services, MegaMeeting includes free Voice Over IP, so you get audio along with your video. No separate telephone calls are needed.

MegaMeeting’s product also scales from personal and small business use with 10 participants or fewer, on up to private branded enterprise solutions with the maximum number of attendees determines only by your available bandwidth and the number of seats purchased in your account. All of their plans offer unlimited video conferencing worldwide 24/7. Professional solutions support screen, application and desktop sharing plus PowerPoint presentations and computer sharing.

How much does all of this cost? Personal accounts start at under $50 a month. Professional accounts start at $15 a seat with a 3 seat minimum and get cheaper from there. Enterprise level solutions hosted on your own servers are appropriately priced, but considerably cheaper than alternative solutions.