Any ideas for customer working from home?

[ARCOER]

Thanks in advanced.
I have a customer that will be working from home and she will VPN into our network to work. She doesn't have a LAN line for phone or a blackberry to recieve calls. We are trying to find a cheaper way than giving her a blackberry and paying the monthly fee. I found out that Majic Jack will not work along side VPN. Anyone know a cost effective way to foward her work number to her house without paying a monthly bill?

 

[vaoldschl]

Depends on the phone system at her office. Lots of systems can handle remote forwarding but you would be eating up the incoming line plus an outgoing one to make the connection so if you don't have the resources in place it could affect your other users. Or, if it is a POTS line, have the call forwarding feature turned on at the CO and just let the phone company's switch handle it. You would pay for the feature but not as much as you would for a blackberry.

 

[ARCOER]

We have the capabilities to forward offnet but she doesnt have a number to forward too. I am trying to see if I can set up a VoIP phone here onsite and have softphone software on her laptop at home to forward the calls to. Not sure if I can do that or not.
When I do remote forwarding it eats up and incoming line and an outgoing line. Will this cause incoming calls to the extension to get a busy signal or not answer at all when the customer is using her cell phone it is forwarded to?

 

[SYQUEST]

That depends on the phone system and what features are on the cell phone. If cost is such a problem (something for nothing) keep her at the office!

....JIM....

 

[ARCOER]

Thanks, my thoughts exactly.

 

[donb01]

Maybe get her a phone with a low-end Lingo or Vonage VOIP service off her internet connection and then CFW the office hone to that number. What's cool about that is say you have a remote employee in some other town that's a long distance call from work. You can get her a lingo number local to work and put the Lingo box anywhere you have high speed internet access and receive calls for that number. I have a $14.95 lingo plan for myself at home, and whenever I'm traveling I just take the lingo box with me and hook it up in the hotel room. Then I can make and receive calls from there just like I was at home. Some hotels don't have hardwired connections anymore, just wireless, so I use an old Xbox wireless adapter set for DHCP to access their system and that usually works pretty good. In a pinch I have also connected to their network with the wireless in my laptop and then shared my internet connection to the ethernet port on the laptop and connected the Lingo box to that...

The things come in pretty handy and the service is relatively cheap if you're going to make use of it.

Just my $0.02 )

 

[baldwincl]

I would suggest a pair of ATAs if your system doesnt support voip phones. Plug an analog station into one, connect over VPN and the analog line comes out the other side. You will just need one FXO and one with an FXS port. Take a look at the linksys "SPA" series.

 

[Bas1234]

What is the brand of you Phone system like someone above already asked?

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It works! Now if only I could remember what I did...

Dain Bramaged
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