Worldwide, business leaders are looking at ways for staff to work remotely from their own virtual offices. A key consideration is keeping staff in touch with each other to collaborate, make / receive calls and work efficiently regardless of location. Learn how to best enable remote workers to stay productive below.
Whether it is an individual or a group of extensions, they can be set to remote phones in a few key ways. 3CX supports both STUN (Session Traversal Utilities over NAT) and SBC (Session Border Controller) provisioning, for supported physical phones. Both methods allow phones to be drop shipped to remote locations, where they can be plugged in and automatically set themselves against an extension.
STUN requires some firewall pin holing to allow for the RTP audio traffic to traverse correctly. If there is more than 1 extension present at that site, the “PBX delivers audio” needs to be turned on so traffic can reach the correct device.
A SBC requires a Raspberry Pi, Windows or Linux machine to be installed. It will then operate as a man–in–the–middle to send / receive / encrypt traffic. The SBC also allows for remote phones to utilise Hot Desking functionality. Users can log in and out of a physical phone, that has been set as a Hot Desking extension.
Physical phones that haven’t yet undergone inter-op with 3CX can still be manually registered against a PBX. There are excellent portable Wi–Fi phones such as the Grandstream DP730 and DECT units available with the Grandstream DP730 and Yealink W80B.
Mobile phone clients can also be used to quickly enable remote extensions. A mobile app can be installed via the Google Play Store / Apple Store. It is quickly set up by opening an attachment from a welcome email or scanning a QR code. Mobile has an added benefit – if a user is a
lready in self-isolation, they can quickly download the app and be set in seconds to make and take calls. This will utilise their Wi–Fi connection.
Hard forwards for an extension can also send calls to a designated mobile– although this incurs a mobile phone call cost. Our recommendation is to utilise the apps for the most cost-effective solution.
3CX’s WebMeeting can also be used to create video meeting sessions for team collaboration. It can also replace face to face customer meetings. A WebMeeting session can be set up and joined in seconds, from a capable browser such as Firefox or Chrome.
3CX can enable any worker needing communications from a remote site – this is increasingly common given the current world health situation. Combine it with a tool such as Go-Global, which provides easy access to on premise SQL, email, intranet and applications. This allows staff to be virtually in office, but working safe and soundly from a remote location. Want to know more? Drop us a line at voip@sofsol.co.nz!