Inflow Communications Hits the Slopes Again Installing an Enterprise-Class, ShoreTel, VoIP Phone System for Mt. Bachelor Ski Resort

When Mt. Bachelor Ski Resort, located near Bend, Oregon, needed to upgrade their business phone system they looked to Inflow Communications and ShoreTel for answers.

Mt. Bachelor had several needs to be addressed starting with the fact that the existing Siemens phone system was becoming obsolete making the availability of replacement parts an issue. The current phone system lacked the modern features like mobility integration, Unified Messaging, and intelligent call routing necessary to adequately support their business. The guest services personnel needed more “call center” features like queuing and system-wide presence management to better handle inbound guests calls. And most importantly, since the phone is the primary communication method with guests, Mt. Bachelor needed a VoIP phone system that was robust and fault tolerant under a number of different situations.

Better Management in the Office

To solve Mt. Bachelor’s phone system woes, Inflow Communications installed two ShoreTel, Unified Communications systems (one at the administrative office in Bend, Oregon and one at the resort on the mountain) connecting the two sites via a microwave radio. All calls enter the system via two PRI voice connections at the office in Bend. Since most of the resort’s guest services personnel are located at the admin office, Inflow equipped these users with ShoreTel Agent Call Communicator Licenses, which provides the ability to see review calls in queue for longest hold time, position, etc. and status (on the phone, do not disturb, etc.) of all users across the organization.

Better Reliability on the Mountain

Working with Inflow, the Mt. Bachelor IT staff installed ShoreTel ShoreGear Voice switches in three base stations on the mountain and these stations are connected to each other via a gigabit fiber optic network. The ShoreGear switches register VoIP phones throughout the network and connect the analog phones and devices located at the ski lifts. The network is designed so that if any of the switches become unavailable the phone registered to that switch will automatically move to one of the other two switches. (This set up demonstrates ShoreTel’s unique N+1 call processing redundancy feature.) The system is truly distributed because each voice switch has the entire system’s data burned into flash memory (note, there are no failure prone hard drives used).

To round out the phone system, redundant voice mail and auto-attendant servers were installed at each location. And should these servers become unavailable, the ShoreTel Director Server will take over automatically. The entire VoIP phone system is administered via a clean, elegant web-based administration tool significantly reducing the ongoing maintenance cost of the system. It also allows the resort’s staff to be “empowered” to manage the system without a heavy reliance on outside vendors.

It’s Not Just a Phone System

Inflow continually strives to provide communications technology solutions that solve our customers’ business challenges. It’s important to not to see a business phone system as just that – a phone system. With the advances in Unified Communication technologies your phone system can (and should) become a platform that consolidates all forms of corporate communications into one, easy-to-use tool set. With ShoreTel, organizations can now leverage one application to communicate via VOIP audio, web collaboration, Instant Messaging, mobility / smart device integration, and video. Furthermore, because ShoreTel is standards-based, it can integrate with business-critical applications like CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications and ERP systems.

R & D – An Important Factor in Determining what Unified Communication Manufacture to Go with

A business phone system / Unified Communication investment should last your organization 10-15 years. This is why it is so important to evaluate your prospective manufactures’ R&D commitment to the VOIP platform they’re proposing. Examples of things to look for:

The prospective manufacture has acquired another company (Avaya acquires Nortel, Mitel acquires InterTel). Are they quoting you the acquired company’s technology? What’s their commitment to those products? Are they going to send those products out to pasture and require you to “upgrade” to the new technology (upgrade – as in forklift)? Are they going to invest R&D dollars into that technology? Get empirical evidence on the manufacture’s plans. Don’t take the sales person’s word for it. I’ve rarely seen this go well (how are you doing InterTel and Nortel customers?) You the customer could lose big. I’ve seen companies purchase a phone system only to have it End of Life in 8 months.

The prospective manufacture supports 10 different product lines. Do they have a small, medium, kind-of medium, large and very large product lines? What platform gets the R&D dollars? What’s the upgrade path if you outgrow one line? Oh, you have to completely rip and replace the base system, but you can still use your phones! That’s not an upgrade path…

The prospective manufacture sells 10 different product lines and thousands of products. Do they sell business phone systems, television sets (Toshiba), network equipment, residential DSL routers, video cameras, wind mills, cars, etc? You think this is funny, but very true. Oddly enough, these manufactures don’t have a stellar history of providing adequate support to their clients (I’m being sarcastic).

Inflow Communications is a Portland, Oregon based company with an office in San Francisco, CA. We only specialize in Unified Communications projects. Inflow doesn’t support servers, storage, wireless equipment, etc. Our core Unified Communications product is ShoreTel. ShoreTel shares the same philosophy as we do – don’t try to do everything mediocre, do a few things very well. ShoreTel’s core VOIP technology is the same for a 10-phone office as it is for a single system, global organization with thousands of users. You simply add appliances to expand on the product. They don’t sell TVs, DSL routers, etc. Last, 27% of their revenues get reinvested back into their core platform. This is why their technology enhancements are staggering. Frankly, the competition can’t keep up. By the way, you as ShoreTel support customer, get access to all of the enhancements via software upgrades.

As an example, stay tuned to learn about ShoreTel’s Google and MAC integration enhancements…..

Unified Communications and Mobility – The Death of the VOIP Handset Part 2

ShoreTel has just released their “ShoreTel Mobility” suite of products. This provides the following functionality:

• Your Smart Phone becomes a secure SIP VOIP Extension off your corporate PBX over any Wi-Fi network (home, corporate, public hot spot, etc) or your mobile carrier’s data network. The “hand-off” between the cellular, 3G, or Wi-Fi networks happens automatically without dropping the call.

Think about the cost reduction opportunities here. How many mobile phones do you manage in your business? What if you could significantly reduce the mobile plans on each phone? What about employees whom travel internationally? What if they could become a SIP VOIP endpoint to your PBX and completely avoid international roaming? Do the math, it could be a lot.

Perhaps it’s enough savings to allow you to start migrating away from that tank of a legacy PBX to VOIP. Notice I said “migrate” and not “forklift”. Inflow Communications can integrate a VOIP phone system platform to your legacy PBX, deploy mobile integration to your smart phone users, provide Unified Communications tools to all your employees (regardless of what phone system they’re on), and we can do it at a pace that makes the most sense for your organization.

We’re happy to do a free technical and economic analysis / design for you.

Beyond incredible savings and a very quick ROI, ShoreTel’s mobility solution offers a lot of features. Tune into my next blog to learn more.

Travis Dillard is the President of Inflow Communications. Inflow Communications is a Portland, Oregon-based company that designs, deploys, and supports enterprise-class VOIP, business phone systems, and Unified Communications solutions to businesses throughout Oregon, Washington, and California.

Unified Communications and Mobility – The Death of the VOIP Handset Part 1

Nearly one-third of US homes don’t have land lines. 50% of those households, ages 25-29, don’t have land lines. A new Gartner Report says that, by 2012, 23% of workers using corporate mobile devices won’t even have a desk phone.

This makes sense to me. It seems as though corporate trends always follow household trends. I haven’t had a land line in my house for years. I’m deploying that same strategy here at Inflow Communications. Inflow Communications’ work-force is virtual and completely mobile. We use ShoreTel VOIP, Data Center Collocation, Terminal Services, SIP Trunking, Lifesize Video Conferencing, smart phone integration, Instant Messaging, and other technologies to maintain effective communication and collaboration with each other and our customers at all times. We use what we sell.

So back to the business phone system handset – I believe it will soon become obsolete. We have ShoreTel VOIP phones on our desks, but my extension, voicemail, email, and Direct Dial Number (DID) is always tied to my Smart Phone. I’m rarely at my desk. My employees, however, can “answer” calls into our business, see all other employees’ presence (on the phone, do not disturb, etc), transfer calls, conference, etc. It doesn’t matter if they’re on a VOIP phone, smart phone, IP Soft Phone, analog land line, etc. All telephony controls and tools are distributed to whatever device they’re on. Our engineers can answer ACD calls into our support queue and respond to our customers immediately anytime, anywhere in the world.

We’ve been doing this for a long time. But now the mobility story is changing again – and it will never be the same. Tune in to my next blog to learn about ShoreTel’s latest advancement in smart phone integration.

Travis Dillard is the President of Inflow Communications, Inc. Inflow Communications is a Portland, Oregon-based company that designs, deploys, and supports enterprise-class VOIP, business phone systems, and Unified Communications solutions to businesses throughout Oregon, Washington, and California.