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Recommended approach to rolling out Single Number Reach/Soft Phones for Remote employees
Hello EE,
We currently have 200 remote employees and are looking at rolling out SNR/Soft Phones to these employees.
Currently customers call their corporate owned cell phone and I understand some challenges keeping us from doing an all at once approach:
1. Notify customers of new number
2. Install 200 software clients
3. Training
I wonder if anyone has done this type of roll out to the field and can give me your experience and best recommendation.
as we draw up our approach.
We currently have 200 remote employees and are looking at rolling out SNR/Soft Phones to these employees.
Currently customers call their corporate owned cell phone and I understand some challenges keeping us from doing an all at once approach:
1. Notify customers of new number
2. Install 200 software clients
3. Training
I wonder if anyone has done this type of roll out to the field and can give me your experience and best recommendation.
as we draw up our approach.
ASKER
We are going to Cisco phones.
Currently as mentioned above they use a corporate owned cell phone
Bandwidth on the PRI will need to increase as well as DIDs for the soft phones when we get to 200, but
In a phased approach I am wondering if anyone had remote users on cell and phased to soft phones and could share what they found worked or didn't?
Currently as mentioned above they use a corporate owned cell phone
Bandwidth on the PRI will need to increase as well as DIDs for the soft phones when we get to 200, but
In a phased approach I am wondering if anyone had remote users on cell and phased to soft phones and could share what they found worked or didn't?
Soft-phones that you want to use is that to be an app installed on the smart phone, how will the device on which the soft phone be connected to the net and then back to the office. Or are you getting a PBX in the cloud?
A PRI will not be sufficient to handle that many calls, a PRI will max out its bandwidth at 24 simultaneous calls.
since the users are remote, your best bet is to look into a Cloud based PBX for those users.
If you use cisco phones for remote users, will they be roaming/mobile or situated in their home/office and will use the home internet connection?
Do you have any PBX in the location where the Business is Head Quartered?
Can the PBX that You do have support the soft phones or the 200 remote phones that you are planning on?
You need to establish a base of what the end goal of your situation is.
The difference if you have them thethered to your HQ PBX the traffic from the phone has to hit your PBX before it is sent out via the VOIP FEED. Cloud based the feed goes into the cloud and then to the detination.
Your best bet is to engage hardware vendors through whom you commonly buy things as well as through your PRI provider to have each propose a solution with pricing for what you want.
The numbers can be ported, the issue is that once the cells are scraped. how is the Cisco phone will be connected to the NET to access your PBX or accessing the cloud PBX. if the cell phone is suppose to then have a softphone with the new number, then that is a separate thing.
Your question lacks much of the information dealing with besides the 200 company cell phones what do you have and what is it you want to end up with.
If these two uhndred are similar to telecommuter where they perform their work from home, and installing the softphone on their home computer so that they can answer the call and .....
This type of detail needs to be included.
If these are field sales reps/engineers that go from place to place thus have to maintain an internet connection to be able to communicate......
A quick search, there are several VOIP cloud based PBX providers that have/include softphone apps that will run on android, ios, windows types smart phones.
you will still have to pay for the 200 cells along with the data .......
Are these individuals placing calls or just receive incoming calls?
A PRI will not be sufficient to handle that many calls, a PRI will max out its bandwidth at 24 simultaneous calls.
since the users are remote, your best bet is to look into a Cloud based PBX for those users.
If you use cisco phones for remote users, will they be roaming/mobile or situated in their home/office and will use the home internet connection?
Do you have any PBX in the location where the Business is Head Quartered?
Can the PBX that You do have support the soft phones or the 200 remote phones that you are planning on?
You need to establish a base of what the end goal of your situation is.
The difference if you have them thethered to your HQ PBX the traffic from the phone has to hit your PBX before it is sent out via the VOIP FEED. Cloud based the feed goes into the cloud and then to the detination.
Your best bet is to engage hardware vendors through whom you commonly buy things as well as through your PRI provider to have each propose a solution with pricing for what you want.
The numbers can be ported, the issue is that once the cells are scraped. how is the Cisco phone will be connected to the NET to access your PBX or accessing the cloud PBX. if the cell phone is suppose to then have a softphone with the new number, then that is a separate thing.
Your question lacks much of the information dealing with besides the 200 company cell phones what do you have and what is it you want to end up with.
If these two uhndred are similar to telecommuter where they perform their work from home, and installing the softphone on their home computer so that they can answer the call and .....
This type of detail needs to be included.
If these are field sales reps/engineers that go from place to place thus have to maintain an internet connection to be able to communicate......
A quick search, there are several VOIP cloud based PBX providers that have/include softphone apps that will run on android, ios, windows types smart phones.
you will still have to pay for the 200 cells along with the data .......
Are these individuals placing calls or just receive incoming calls?
ASKER
We currently have 2 PRI lines and 200 users in the office.
We are going to Cisco phones and want to roll out soft phones for remote user computers.
All at once isn't an option as we will need more PRI bandwidth and more DIDs, however, we are not likely able to roll out 200 remote users anyhow.
The idea would be they would VPN in and work as they do now, but rather than using cell phones for business, use soft phone on the computer.
The PBX will support these users. They are home office users (field technician) who are on VPN every day working from their home office. We would like to roll out soft phones to the home office users so they don't always need to be on the cell phone. I have talked to the PRI provider and phone vendor and installation is not an issue, but what I am trying to find out is with the challenge of remote users, has anyone ever done a roll out as this and if so, what did you find worked/not worked? All at once or group approach?
We are going to Cisco phones and want to roll out soft phones for remote user computers.
All at once isn't an option as we will need more PRI bandwidth and more DIDs, however, we are not likely able to roll out 200 remote users anyhow.
The idea would be they would VPN in and work as they do now, but rather than using cell phones for business, use soft phone on the computer.
The PBX will support these users. They are home office users (field technician) who are on VPN every day working from their home office. We would like to roll out soft phones to the home office users so they don't always need to be on the cell phone. I have talked to the PRI provider and phone vendor and installation is not an issue, but what I am trying to find out is with the challenge of remote users, has anyone ever done a roll out as this and if so, what did you find worked/not worked? All at once or group approach?
Test it out. Setup a soft phone on a remote system, VPN from that location and see how it would be managed.
Look into having your existing number /ext that will either be accessed by a softphone or forwarded to the cell number.
And test that if majority is that calls coming to versus calls being initiated by the remote user.
Look into having your existing number /ext that will either be accessed by a softphone or forwarded to the cell number.
And test that if majority is that calls coming to versus calls being initiated by the remote user.
ASKER
Yes, I will definitely do that but figure someone has rolled out soft phones to a number of remote users before in varying locations and could share if they did all at once or best approach they found worked/what didn't work
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It might be possible to port the company issued phone numbers to your voice setup.
Or transition to dialing the main number with their extention.
You should add the detail as well as request attention to add the categories for equipment/hardware.
Is your current system internal or you've signed up with the several VoIP/cloud providers or is that an option/consideration that could simplify the issue with the two hundred remote users.
Is the soft phone you are thinking of will be on their smart phone? Or installed on their laptop accessed on their home network?