The world has gone mobile. While once only busy executives carried smartphones and used mobile email, now even the shoe salesman in Abu Dhabi is packing a smartphone.
This change has made business much more mobile. Employees now can work while traveling, and they can check in from home. This mobility also has greatly increased the number of workers who telecommute at least part of the time.
Along with the mobility explosion has come a related trend, bring-your-own-device (BYOD). With powerful, easy-to-use computers in the pocket of just about every employee, and often a tablet in their bag, it is getting increasingly hard to stop employees from performing their work with their favorite home computing device. Why use an unknown and restrictive work device when a better device that the employee knows is already on hand?
Hence, BYOD.
Businesses are starting to catch on, too, and by 2017 an estimated half of all businesses will actually ask their employees to use their own mobile devices for work.
The BYOD trend comes with challenges, though. One challenge is that while it enables employees to be out of the office and working whenever they are needed, employees are sometimes crippled because they have most but not all of their business functions available.
For all that email and office collaboration apps have brought mobility, the office phone and the fax are often still only available in the actual office. BYOD and mobility are promising enough that employees will use them, but when they do they are signing up for periods of less than full productivity.
This need not be the case, however, even if it is the norm. The solution is using voice- and fax-over-IP, known as VoIP and FoIP, respectively. Businesses that adopt these IP versions of calling and faxing are able to then route calls and faxes to employees no matter where they work. VoIP and FoIP eliminate the last reasons to be working in the office aside from putting in face time for the boss.
Making the switch is easy, too. For VoIP, it is as easy as signing up for a hosted VoIP account. Through a cloud service, a business can get digital calling without having to keep a telephone closet full of hardware.
For FoIP, it is even easier. Just use a FoIP adapter on an existing fax machine. AudioCodes (News - Alert) makes a wonderful fax ATA product that can turn a traditional fax into a fax machine that uses the Internet for transmission instead.
The world has gone mobile. This means the office phone and the fax need to go digital.