Give Your Business a Professional Phone System
You no longer have to purchase or lease expensive telecom equipment to give your business a professional telephone service complete with such features as an "automatic attendant" and hold music. You can set up your own small-business PBX (Private Branch Exchange) using Web-based services that are available at a fraction of the cost of old hardware-based PBXs.
Get VoIP Plus PBX
MailStreet from Apptix offers you a simple but powerful way to beef up your business's phone services. It uses Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to route calls, so you need to have a reliable broadband Internet connection. You can keep your existing phone number, provided that it's located in the United States.
To start, you sign up for a MailStreet Voice account. A Business Plan ($40 per month per line) covers unlimited incoming and outgoing calls in the United States and Canada (other countries incur extra per-minute charges). The plan includes other popular services such as voice mail and call transfer. A Premium Plan ($50 per month per line) adds features like hold music and permits integration with Microsoft Outlook, so you can manage your voice mail in the same app as your e-mail.
Since standard phones won't work with the MailStreet service, you must either use a softphone (a software-based telephone with a PC headset) or purchase a MailStreet-supported IP telephone ($165 and up).
I used the softphone, which is fairly easy to set up. I simply downloaded the free X-Lite 3.0 Softphone app from CounterPath and then quickly configured it, following MailStreet Voice's instruction guide.
For optimum sound quality with a softphone, I recommend using a good USB headset with a microphone, which provides better (digital) sound than an analog headset and starts at about $20.
To set up the call management features of MailStreet Voice, log in to the MailStreet Web site. Sorting through the vast array of options there will take you some time. For example, you'll see 17 different rules options just for handling incoming calls, based on things like calling number and time of day.
Your everyday interface to MailStreet is Call Manager, an application that you download from the MailStreet site. With Call Manager you can set your status (in office, out of office, busy, or unavailable) and decide whether to take a call or send it to voice mail. You can also transfer calls, place them on hold, initiate conference calls, or hang up.
Richard Morochove
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