BY Tom Keating

Technology that effectively expands the boundaries of the corporate office inevitably changes a few other things as well. Such as the extent to which corporate travelers keep in touch with the office. Such as the sense of immediacy available to telecommuters, who might otherwise feel as though they?ve been cast adrift, and somehow kept apart from the mainstream of the company?s work and information flows.

In the case of corporate travelers, or road warriors, keeping in touch is greatly facilitated by office-expanding technologies that utilize voice, that is, live interactive voice, not just voice mail, which is necessarily limited to periodic, or perhaps even sporadic, call-ins. As for telecommuters, few things could enliven a data connection more than a live interactive voice exchange.

If you doubt the importance of voice, in the sense we’ve been discussing it, consider this example: While you are traveling, an important call is routed to your office extension. The caller is impatient, and can’t be bothered leaving a voice mail. He wants to make a deal right away. So, he hangs up and calls one of your competitors.

How often is this scenario played out? It’s hard to say. Unless the customer leaves a voice mail, if only to berate you for your absence, or unless the customer zeros out to an operator to have you paged, you will never know you’ve missed a business opportunity.

POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS
At least two solutions can help corporations cope with a far-flung work force. That is, there are solutions that can make office-based voice communications resources available to remote workers. And, more than incidentally, such solutions can make remote workers available to anyone who may need to speak to them.

The solutions we consider in this column provide remote voice and follow-me capabilities. Remote voice is the ability to make calls into the office, over any data connection (ISDN, T1, analog, frame relay, etc.), and then out through the corporate PBX. In addition to making outbound calls through the corporate PBX from a remote location, you can also receive inbound calls, that is, calls into the PBX that are routed out to wherever you are.

Imagine: You can be in a hotel somewhere, log on to the corporate network, and receive and initiate calls as though you were sitting at your office extension! Now, you can avoid missing incoming calls even when you are on the road.

Of course, there are one-number-follow- me products that will do pretty much the same thing as remote voice products, that is, give road warriors remote access to all incoming calls. What’s distinctive about follow- me, however, is that it lets a caller reach someone no matter where that someone happens to be — a hotel, restaurant, car, train, etc. As long as a person has a cellular phone while on the road (and has it turned on), that person will always be available for a caller to reach them.

REMOTE VOICE
Remote voice products benefit road warriors, telecommuters, and administrators. These products are available from several vendors.

Road Warriors
While many people take advantage of business travel to generate new business or enhance their knowledge, they also risk missing the benefits of being in touch with fellow employees. Sure, road warriors check in every once in a while, but continuous, interactive information access can make the difference between falling behind and staying ahead.

There is a catch, however, to using remote voice technology while on the road. You need to be logged on. If you aren’t in the hotel or wherever your remote voice product is located, then you obviously can’t receive or make calls from the corporate PBX. Therefore, remote voice products are useful to business travelers only when they have returned to the hotel room. At that point, they can turn on the lap-top and log on to the corporate PBX.

Of course, this assumes that the business traveler returns to the hotel room at a decent hour and stays logged on for a few hours. Nevertheless, if the business traveler receives but one important phone call in the time he or she is logged onto the corporate PBX, then deploying these devices can pay considerable dividends.

Another consideration, of course, is the time zone in which the business traveler is located. The time zone will determine which areas of the country or even the world will be open for business. For instance, a person traveling to the East Coast has the advantage that at 7 P.M. EST the West Coast businesses are still open.

In addition, if you have to speak to someone back in the West Coast office, you could simply make an intercom call to their extension using a remote voice solution. You could even take it a step further and initiate a corporate-wide announcement/page on the inter-com system! Imagine being on the road and being able to say "John, you’re not at your desk, and I need to speak to you right away," which is spoken over the PBX intercom system that could be located 3000 miles away or more!

And how about conference calls? You could arrange for one of the phone companies to set up a conference call for you. But why bother with the cost and hassle? Using remote voice solutions, you can access the power and functionality of your corporate PBX. Need to hold a conference? No problem. Need to transfer the caller to accounting after selling something on the road? Again, no problem. With remote voice products, you are virtually sitting at your desk’s phone extension.

Telecommuters
While remote voice can benefit road warriors, it really shines in telecommuting applications. Road warriors, we found, can’t be logged on throughout the work day. Indeed, they may be logged on for just a few hours at the end of the day. Telecommuters aren’t limited in this way. They can be logged onto the corporate PBX from their homes for the entire workday. As such, they can have full-time access to the corporate PBX.

In addition, many remote voice products are also capable of multiplexing data. Thus, telecommuters can send/receive both voice and data from the corporate network. Thus, as part of the network, in addition to the voice aspect, telecommuters can receive e-mails and faxes, and thus enjoy unbroken communications with their fellow employees.

Another benefit is that a company can derive extra value from its investment in ACD equipment. As far as the ACD is concerned, the remote agents are connected to the PBX. Hence, the corporate office can transparently route calls to telecommuters. You can have a call center consisting of agents located anywhere in the world!

Administrators
With remote voice, administrators can take advantage of tried-and-true call detail recording (CDR), which most companies already incorporated with their PBX system(s). Thus, utilizing the existing CDR reporting mechanism allows for a central store of call records, which is much easier for an administrator to monitor and use as a source of meaningful reports.

Competing Products

• DataRace’s Be There! About a year ago, TMC Labs reviewed this extraordinary product, which, in addition to its remote voice capabilities, allowed you to telecommute using ordinary analog phone lines to access the corporate network, thereby giving you access to e-mail, files, faxes, etc. This product also featured great CTI extras, such as a PC-phone GUI and a contact manager. We were also impressed by the product’s multiplexer technology, which allowed for both remote voice and data .
  
  Because it was such an innovative, creative, and very useful technology, we couldn’t help but speculate about potential improvements — what competitors might eventually offer. We agreed that the DataRace solution was basically a Windows NT 4.0 RAS server with DataRace’s own proprietary modem cards in it, as well as proprietary modem cards for the remote clients. What DataRace did was take existing technology and standards and then provide a link to analog ports on PBXs .
  
  We wondered why more companies weren’t already doing this sort of thing. After some discussion, we pretty much decided that the major PBX manufacturers would soon enter this market space. We joked that Lucent would offer a similar solution in 3–6 months .
  
  We also speculated that it would be possible to use IP telephony technology over an Internet (VPN) connection to a PBX, that it would be possible to eliminate an analog or ISDN dial-up connection to these remote voice products .Using an Internet-based VPN would also eliminate any long-distance dial-up charges to attain these remote voice capabilities.

• Lucent’s Virtual Telephone: Although our prediction was off by a few months, Lucent Technologies did eventually create a dandy of a remote voice product Released in March 1998, this product, called Virtual Telephone, lets a remote worker access e-mail, hear and respond to voice mail, and make real-time phone calls simultaneously. This can be done over a single phone line (dial-up RAS), a LAN connection, and (as we anticipated) a virtual private network (VPN) connection .
  
  Initially, Virtual Telephone will perform the remote voice capabilities by running software on top of Lucent’s Internet Telephony Server-E (ITS-E), an H.323-compatible gateway. What’s nice about Lucent’s solution is that you don’t need to buy separate units/boxes for each recipient of remote voice capabilities. To use Lucent’s solution, all you need is some sort of network connection to their H.323 Internet gateway, whether it’s through an analog dial-up connection, frame relay, ISDN, T1, or any other network connection. Then, all you need is some software on the clients to access Lucent’s gateway. And, as we all know, using a software-based solution is cheaper and easier to manage than buying a piece of hardware for every client.

• Other Remote Voice Products: MCK Communications offers EXTender, which is available in both analog and ISDN versions . Another company, Multitech, provides products that utilize Digital Simultaneous Voice and Data (DSVD). Like DataRace’s Be There!, Multitech’s products simply use analog lines and multiplex the voice and data.

FOLLOW-ME
Nowadays, it seems every CTI product incorporates follow-me functionality. Follow-me products give road warriors nearly 100-per-cent availability, which means callers are able to reach them by dialing their extension. The road warrior just has to be willing and able to answer the phone. However, follow-me lacks some of the features offered by remote voice products.

For instance, many follow-me products call between two and six numbers in round-robin fashion until they find you. This sort of search could take several minutes, assuming the follow-me product dials, waits four or five rings, hangs up, and then dials the next number. Many callers will refuse to wait this long, even if they hear prompts announcing, "Please wait while I try the next number…"

Another limitation is that follow-me products are designed with inbound calls in mind. You can still make outbound calls, but these calls are not tied to the office PBX, which can complicate administration and make reporting a bit more difficult.

Finally, follow-me products may be incompatible with hotel PBXs. Let’s look at what happens when a follow-me product dials a hotel (say, 1-800-555-1000), but then needs to dial the room number (say, 1026). After the follow-me product dials the 800 number, the hotel receptionist usually answers. Now, even if you put some pause characters (commas) in the dial string, I sincerely doubt even the smartest hotel receptionists would be able to translate the DTMF digits (1026) that the follow-me product would play into their ears!

I don’t want to overstate the limitations of follow-me products. In fact, I like follow-me products. They certainly have their merits, as you might gather from their growing popularity among business users. Further, they keep getting better. For example, some follow-me products can get around the inability of hotel receptionists to translate DTMF digits. That is, some follow-me products can translate the extension or room number to a voice prompt, such as "Please transfer me to room XXX."

CONCLUSION
The case for extending corporate voice communications capabilities to remote workers is compelling.  On the one hand, you’ve got the business imperative of making remote workers, road warriors, and telecommuters more productive. On the other hand, you’ve got the potential for government sanctions. For example, the federal government is already promoting telecommuting as a way to reduce traffic, smog, and fuel consumption.

Not that businesses will feel forced into implementing remote voice and/or follow-me capabilities. Implementing these capabilities should be fairly painless, now that the technology exists to make such improvements simple and cost-effective. Further, businesses will look forward to enjoying the benefits of remote voice/follow-me capabilities. For example, in call centers, agents needn’t be "chained" to the physical call center to receive calls from the ACD. Indeed, they can also perform conference calling, call recording, and other advanced functionality, all from their homes.

Another example is something I like to call casual telecommuting. In the not-too-distant future, companies may lend out revolving or shared remote voice units to employees — casual telecommuters — who would like to work from home for a day or two. The sleeker products, such as Lucent’s Virtual Telephone, wouldn’t even require any sharing or revolving of hard ware, since they would need nothing more than a data connection to the office and some client software.

As the corporate office extends its voice communications capabilities to remote workers, we may eventually consider how remote voice/follow-me has a downside: You’re never away from the office! This isn’t as funny as it may sound. Many telecommuters say they’re able to accomplish a lot more at home simply because they aren’t interrupted all the time by incoming phone calls. What happens to such productivity gains when the home phone is a virtual extension of the corporate PBX? And one of the benefits of business travel, being able to concentrate on the task at hand (whether it is a seminar or a trade show or a meeting of some sort), could be undermined by a constant influx of phone calls.

Eventually, we’ll have to find a way to get the best of both worlds: unbroken communications on the one hand, and the ability to escape distractions on the other. Right now, the only option is to turn off the laptop, in the case of remote voice, or to turn off the cell phone, in the case of follow-me. Can we do better than to rely on the on/off switch? Perhaps a less abrupt, less all-or-nothing alternative could be found. Something more sophisticated, more managed, such as a predefined escalation procedure, which could screen out nuisance calls, but forward really important communications. Of course, it may be too early to speculate about such refinements. We’re still getting experience with the current generation of remote communications products. This experience will surely suggest improvements for future generations.

Since this month's column is related to remote access, now is an opportune time to discuss of of our recent discoveries: A remote access bug. We came across it while we were setting up a few laptops to dial into a RAS server. Our aim was to have some of our Win95 clients use Microsoft DUN (Dial-Up Networking) to connect to our RAS server, which was connected to an 800 number. We put some pause characters in the dial string (commas) to delay transmitting the DTMF digits for the extension. (A typical dial string would look like this: 1-800-555-1000,,,,,100.) We needed the pauses because the auto-attendant usually took a few seconds to answer.

Anyway, all but one of the laptops worked. When this troublesome laptop dialed the 800 number, our auto-attendant would answer, according to plan. (We could confirm this by listening to the auto-attendant over the laptop's modem speaker.) Then, after a few seconds, we could hear the DTMF digits played over the laptop's modem speaker. However, the auto-attendant would not detect the digits. Instead, it kept on playing the voice prompts, when it should have transferred to extension 100.

Now here's where things got really strange. We changed the 800 number to our local number, 852-6800, which was hooked into the same auto-attendant as the 800 number. The, the laptop worked fine. (Hmmm, dialing the 800 number doesn't work, but dialing directly into the same auto-attendant does? Odd.)

You might suppose that the 800 number and the 852-6800 number weren't configured in the same way. However, this was not the case. All the other laptops worked just fine using the exact same phone outlet to dial out on, and these laptops dialed the exact same 800 number!

The only difference we could see was that the troublesome laptop had a slightly different looking DUN interface. We decided to install Microsoft's latest DUN 1.2, as well as a Winsock upgrade. That solved the problem. The DTMF digits were now detected on the 800 line. However, to this day, we are still perplexed as to how DUN 1.2 and/or the Winsock upgrade solved the problem.