How smart does your desk phone need to be?

I'm a bit torn here.

I have two gripes with IP phones, firstly cost, it might not seem like a big deal when you're dealing with enterprise, but when the Australian NBN finally kicks in and your only option for telephony is IP, it becomes a big deal.

Secondly, features. Smart cell phones have had this cornered from the start, but why make it so hard to manage something like contact lists with desk phones? Is it REALLY that hard?

But this is the bit that tears me, I really do want a functional desk phone, I prefer that, and it works better for me.

However, an option with the NBN will be a box that plugs into the network and supplies IP functionality, with a regular POTS interface at the other end for compatibility with existing setups.

And that's exactly what I think will overwhelmingly happen. People will get phones they really want: What they have now, which is the absolute minimim of processing power. Myself included.

Chat, Power, and frog-boiling

To the chap who extolls chat for its anti-weasel properties (logging what was said by whom), I note that a former coworker (still at the weasel-farm I left years ago) has informed me that they are now forbidden to log chats. Not surprising from a company that shunned email for coordination in favor of flaky wikis and meetings that reliably started 18 minutes after the scheduled time and consisted mainly of "Oh, did you expect me to do that? I'll get to it this week." repeated weekly.

The pictured dock gave me shudders as it seems that all device manufacturers have taken up the position that Toshiba took in 2000, when I was shocked to be told, after the battery in a month-old laptop had failed, that it was my fault, as I was not meant to leave it on the adapter/charger once it was fully charged, and by doing so I had killed the battery. SInce I was familiar with IBM and Apple laptops that could be "docked" for days and still retain full capacity, I thought Toshiba were clueless feebs, but my most recent Apple laptop has the same sort of warning. I'd hate to think how often one would need to replace the battery in a docked iPad.

Voice Quality? I pine for that days that a phone, while far from perfect, did not regularly sound as if the call to Dave in Accounting was via satellite to Ulan Bator. I wonder how bad voice quality will get once all us old farts who can remember those days have gone permanently on-hook.

HMRC - what not to do

If you want a case study on how to select an utterly crap handset and couple with stupidly burdensome policies then go visit HMRC.

Some examples:

- crap earpiece speaker - default volume so low it can only be heard in a quiet office; turn volume up and speaker starts clipping and caller still unintelligible

- crap earpiece speaker design - pressing it more firmly against your ear doesn't actually cut out any more background noise

- personal 03000 xxxxxx number requires logon - so visitors can't just sit at a spare desk and make a call - you have to lend them your phone and go sit at the spare desk yourself while they make the call

- if you go to a different building and need to make a call (e.g. duck-out of a meeting to check some facts) you can't just pick-up the phone at the nearest free desk. Instead you have to log on first. (Which then means that your own desk phone is logged off so you have to log on *again* when you get back)

- cord too short - so can't hold the phone by hunching-up your shoulder while writing notes - the springy cord pulls (launches!) it away

- large LCD display but we still need number code sequences to get anything done

- listening to voicemail is not a 'one button press' activity

Did I mention that it is utterly crap? Did I mention that the launch publicity claimed it would be 'better'? Did I mention that complaints are ignored as it is too late to do anything?

Smart phones for dumb users?

We have about 50 employees at 4 sites, and use Shoretel phones and Software.

And despite the fact that every single desktop runs the Shoreware client, so that you can call someone by typing their name into the client, HR still insists on e-mailing out a phone list every month that people print off and look-up the numbers whenever they want to call someone. Cut and paste a number from an e-mail into the ShoreTel client (or even right-click and dial if you have the right addons)? That's too much like magic for my users!

Managing voicemail is much easier when you can see the list of 4 or 5 calls in your voice-mailbox, with the CallerID displayed, so that you can listen to the 3rd call in the list, without having to wade through the previous 2. But no, people still insist on dialling into their voicemail, and listening to the messages one by one.

A few people have picked up on the fact that they can "pull" their own extension to another handset, if they need to work at another office.

Most of these advantages come from smart infrastructure, rather than smart handsets, but it doesn't matter where the smarts are, if people won't take advantage of it.

IP Phone application

That's the only feature I need, so that I can take calls on the laptop at home and it looks like I'm at my desk.

Smart but not intelligent!

The Shoretel Dock enhances the telecom's side of the smartphones persona, the question is whether it is as well presented and executed as Ubuntu for Android that took advantage of a smartphone's computer persona.

So the dock needs to be smart in terms of its ability to leverage the value of a desk phone (handset/headset, keypad, location) and so enhance the smartphone experience and smart in the way it harnesses the intelligence contained in the smartphone to enrich the communications experience.

I suspect that a key use case is that the reason the user is at a desk is because they need to use a desk based computer. Hence rather than having the smartphone just littering the desk why not provide a place for it to go and which would increase it's utility.

I don't really understand all this complaining about IP-phones. At work I set up a simple asterisk server (running on Debian) with a postgresql database backend for administration.

When anybody calls, the number is matched against the database of customers. If found, the customer name will show up in the screen in addition to the number. Android cellphones integrate nicely with its native SIP stack, meaning calls can be forwarded to cellphones at no additional charge.

Our home-grown CRM allows one to click a call button next to a customer name to call that person from your local phone. The phones were cheap, the PBX was free (it runs on a server already in use for other things).