This time, let’s look at a business phone system that provides both incoming and outgoing service, plus actual phones. The folks at RingCentral have kindly set me up with one of their packages, the RingCentral Office. They also offer RingCentral Online, an inbound service similar to those listed above, but we’ll focus on the Office package for simplicity.

Options

RingCentral Office has three pricing levels, ranging from a one-line, 10-extension plan for $49.99 per month to an 8-line, unlimited extension plan for $179.99 per month. Each plan comes with various combinations of toll-free and local numbers, as well as toll-free or local dedicated fax numbers. You can also port your existing local or toll-free numbers to RingCentral.

All plans are advertised as having “unlimited minutes,” but (as is apparently the norm among VoIP providers) “unlimited” actually means 5,000 minutes per month; if you go over that, you’ll be charged 3.9 cents/minute. That works out to roughly 2.5 hours of talking per day. Are you and your colleagues on the phone that much? At my company, we aren’t, but some folks might need to be aware of this limit.

What You Get

RingCentral Office includes all of the features that have become standard for Internet phone services. They offer numbers in the U.S., Canada and the UK.

RingCentral offers two types of phones. The phone RingCentral provided to me is a Linksys (now owned by Cisco) SPA942. At first glance, it looks much like a modern business phone. But instead of plugging it into a phone jack, one connects it to the Internet using a standard RJ-45 network cable. If you only have one Internet connection, you can plug the phone into your internet connection, and then plug other devices into the phone. I was pleased with the phone. It’s relatively easy to operate, but strangely, it doesn’t support a headset, something I’ve gotten quite used to.

If you would prefer to use your existing phone equipment, RingCentral also offers an ATA adapter which connects the Internet to regular phones. Since most people aren’t technically-minded enough to want to fiddle with ATAs or configuration of phones, RingCentral ships their equipment pre-configured. All I had to do was plug in the power and the ethernet cable, and the phone was online and ready to use. RingCentral tells me that they provide their phones at or below wholesale cost; a little research confirmed that their equipment prices are quite low.

When you or your colleagues are out of the office, you can use the web site and Windows- or Mac-based softphone application to send, receive and manage calls and messages. One of the unusual features of the softphone app is the ability to view incoming calls and reply with a short message like “I’ll call you back in 10 minutes” without actually answering the phone call. There’s also integration with Outlook’s contact list.

For iPhone users, there’s a native application that provides easy access to voicemail (separate from the iPhone’s built-in voicemail) and faxes. You can also use the iPhone app to make calls showing the Caller ID from your business line — without displaying your iPhone’s telephone number. Similar native applications are being developed for other platforms; I gather that the BlackBerry is next on RingCentral’s list. I didn’t test RingCentral’s software, but I’ve gotten positive feedback from others who’ve used it.

Ordering

When ordering, you’ll be asked to specify the plan you want, the number of lines needed, as well as the number of local and toll-free numbers. You can create a plan that meets your specific needs, and you can change plans at will, since you don’t need to sign a contract. If you return the phones, the return will be subject to a restocking fee.

RingCentral boasts that its services can be priced and purchased directly from its web site without needing to call (although it does offer ordering by phone). While web ordering is certainly possible, I found the website to be less than clear in explaining the differences between the various plans and options. RingCentral tells me that a redesigned site is on the way.

Quality

Of course, in a business environment, call quality is key. In my tests, I (and the people I talked to) agreed that our conversations were clear, loud, and with none of the delay that sometimes plagues services like Google Voice. RingCentral tells me that the service is SIP-based, but that they’ve done significant signal processing so that anyone with a DSL, cable or faster Internet connection should hear excellent sound quality. Dialup connections aren’t recommended, for obvious reasons.

Reliability

RingCentral has been around for several years, but only started offering the Office product in early 2009. According to the company, it is now providing its Office service to over 3,000 organizations of various sizes, including some of over 50 users, with the four-line option is the most popular. They have multiple levels of redundancy and backups, but of course, if your local Internet connection or power goes out, you’ll be unable to use RingCentral, or any other Internet-based phone system.

If you are in the market for a virtual PBX system that provides phone hardware with incoming and outgoing service, you’ll want to look at a number of options, including Accessline Digital Business Phone System, FreedomIQ Hosted PBX, and Phone.com Business Phone, Whatever you choose, RingCentral Office is certainly a strong competitor.

Do you use RingCentral?

While heavyweight fixed telepresence systems such as those offered by Cisco are aimed at the enterprise and so are unlikely to be used by many web workers, there is already a huge choice of web app video conferencing options available in this highly competitive space, from higher-end tools like WebEx (also a Cisco product) through midrange offerings like Dimdim (see my recent look at Dimdim Webinar) all the way down to no-frills options like Skype and Tinychat (see my review here). Investment and innovation in this market should bring benefits for us all, as video conferencing makes remote collaboration much easier, from one-to-one meetings all the way up to larger webinars and presentations. Fewer on-site meetings mean reduced travel costs, less time wasted on travel, and a healthier planet, too.

Additionally, as more of us work remotely, we are becoming increasingly isolated from our colleagues. In “Coworking in Rural Places,” Aliza explained how she uses video conferencing to create a “pseudo-coworking space” with her business partner, easing the isolation of working in remote Tok, Alaska. Video conferencing is a great way to establish the rapport that can be so hard to build without the benefit of daily face-to-face interaction.

Do you use video conferencing as part of your remote working setup? What tools do you use?

In a recent post, I blogged about the telecommuting trend, including a data point from a WorldatWork study that found a 39 percent increase in the number of telecommuters in the U.S. between 2006 and 2008. Many businesses are actively seeking to embrace remote working, and Simon’s post on GigaOM Pro, “Enabling the Web Working Revolution” (subscription required) describes some of the other benefits and research on telecommuting.

Today, Cisco Systems released the results of its Teleworker Survey, in which the networking giant surveyed almost 2,000 of its employees to better understand the social, economic and environmental impact of telecommuting.  Here are a few highlights from the research regarding telecommuting statistics:

• $277 million per year in estimated cost savings for Cisco and employees.
• 47,320 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions saved by reduced travel.
• 69 percent of the employees see increased productivity.
• 67 percent said that their work quality improved.
• 80 percent had an improved quality of life.
• On average employees telecommute 2 days per week.

I talked to Rami Mazid, Cisco’s VP of Global Client Services & Operations, about the research and he said that one of the biggest surprises from the study is that people actually spend more time working when they telecommute. Of the time saved by not commuting, 60 percent was spent working more while only 40 percent of the time saved was consumed by personal activities. Mazid also described his personal use of telecommuting at Cisco. Based on his calendar and work scheduled for the day, he decides whether or not he should spend the time working from his office at Cisco or from home. Even when he goes into the office, most of his team meetings are conducted online using WebEx to accommodate employees working from other locations.

Cisco is also redesigning some of its office buildings with the remote worker in mind. Employees who work almost exclusively from home can opt out of having an on-site office altogether. The offices have areas where workers can drop in to work for a day without having an assigned space. A little over a year ago, Intel did something similar in one of its buildings in Oregon. It was a pilot office focused on open spaces and better accommodating remote workers. The company created a bank of first-come, first-serve offices for people who spend most of their time working from home, complete with storage lockers. Most employees still have permanent cubicles, but this is a great way to make better use of expensive office space when many increasingly spend little to no time in an assigned corporate space.

Cisco has several products that are designed to make it easier for people to work remotely, so it’s clear the company has an interest in encouraging telecommuting. But Cisco walks the walk in addition to talking the talk, and are seeing tangible benefits from encouraging employees to stay home.

What have you seen companies do to encourage telecommuting and support remote employees?

Image by flickr user Tim Patterson

The SWC has been conceived as an experiment in using computing technology to address climate change, reducing travel costs and carbon footprints by providing workers with the ability to work remotely away from the City. Cisco, driven by its commitments to the Clinton Global Initiative has also taken the opportunity to introduce some of its leading edge conferencing and collaboration technologies in the SWC.

Designed for individual workers or collaborative groups, the SWC not only offers meeting rooms and deskspace, but lounge areas, childcare, catering, some financial services and is apparently located close to public transport amenities. Currently, the residents include city employees themselves, but the hope is to broaden this group to include local businesses and freelancers.

Here’s a quick video excerpt from a piece on the launch of the SWC…

Amsterdam’s city administration is planning the launch of several more SWCs around the city, over the coming months – each with a different industrial partner – and is looking to experiment in collaborating with countries like India to understand whether this style of working can suit global collaboration.

The SWC is a departure from the coworking culture that we’ve been covering of late at WWD, but as we’ve speculated about the possibility of coworking spaces as a means to address commuting issues, a vehicle for civic regeneration and even childcare solutions, it’s gratifying to see public-private collaborations, such as the SWC, that address each of these areas in an attempt to experiment with new modes of working and living.

As Earth2Tech points out, “remote workers are increasingly cavalier about security issues, as the lines between home and work uses of technology have become more blurred.” While high-end solutions like Cisco Virtual Office will appeal to larger companies, even independent and small-business telecommuters should expect to be faced with questions about security as companies grow more sophisticated in this area.

What do you do to protect company data when you telecommute?

What comprises an effective blogging policy? How do you go about developing such a policy? Do employers have authority in dictating what an employee blogs about, given the company’s name is never mentioned? Do you know if your company has a blogging policy? If so, is it too restrictive?