Conferencing Solution & Online Professional Courses

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Over the past decade VoIP as a communication technology has revolutionized the way we manage our conferencing solution.

The use of broadband Internet to make calls instead of the analog or conventional phone system is simply amazing. It allows a greater degree of freedom to users and at the same time allows better communication over multiple devices with an Internet connection. The technology behind this revolutionary communication system is pretty simple as it only converts sound signals into digital packets that are transferred over the Internet broadband. Thus, everyone who uses VoIP telephony is actually using the Internet to make or receive phone calls.

The business world has taken to VoIP like fish takes to water! Since its inception, VoIP has garnered a lot of support from the business community that immediately understood the multiple benefits offered by this new technology. Not only did it save a lot of money but it also offered seamless communication with numerous advanced telephony features. From music on hold to find me/follow me, VoIP has everything for the modern businesses to excel.

One particular business that has immensely benefited from VoIP is the Online Professional Courses. Since this business is entirely dependent on the Internet, VoIP turned out to be its natural ally when it came to choosing an effective communication system and related conferencing solution for delivery of courses. Online professional courses are offered over the Internet and subscribers to these courses often make web based conference calls to course coordinators and fellow students. The integration of VoIP makes it extremely easy to enable web based conferencing solutions through applications like Skype, etc.

Here is a list of features offered by VoIP and conferencing solution that plays a very important role in delivering professional courses smoothly:

# 1 Find Me/Follow Me Call Routing

Subscribers as well as the course coordinators of online professional courses will certainly appreciate this immensely beneficial feature. This feature facilitates the creation of a contact list of numbers where a particular user can be located before the call is pushed to the voicemail. For instance, if you have an incoming call to your desk phone then it would ring twice before your cell phone starts ringing and on the fifth ring it is your home phone that starts ringing. Thus, all numbers tagged with your contact name keep ringing and when exhausted, the call gets transferred to your voicemail.

#2 Voicemail To E-Mail

This feature is available with standard VoIP suites available in the market and it transcribes the voicemail messages to text. Once converted to text, it is then sent to a designated email id. Thus, subscribers of online professional courses never really have to take the hassle of noting down names, addresses or phone numbers from voicemails. All this will lead to an organized and orderly search of voicemails.

#3 Bandwidth Utilization Along With Detailed Call Reports

Companies offering online professional courses have to decide everything based on concrete and well-organized data reports. Cloud based VoIP telephony provides them with reports on bandwidth utilization and inbound and outbound calls. Detailed reports provide data on call history that includes duration, originator, destination, and cost.

#4 Multimedia Conferencing Solution

Videoconferencing is a seamless activity when companies use VoIP to communicate with their clients and co-workers. Discussions on meetings, agendas, files, daily affairs and deals can be carried out smoothly. This feature is of immense help for companies as well as subscribers of online professional courses as they are able to discuss and share information one-to-one with course coordinators and other students on a real-time basis.

About Nebula Solutions

Nebula Solutions (originally Technology Convergence Group (TCG)) is a provider of business telecommunication solutions in the Dayton, Columbus, and Cincinnati, Ohio areas. Nebula Solutions is a Toshiba Platinum Dealer, which is the highest attainable certification level. Nebula Solutions supports all Toshiba telephone systems from the IPedge VoIP system all the way to Strata communication systems. At Nebula Solutions, our technicians are Toshiba certified and have an average of over 20 years of experience.

Call (888) 257-0955 today for all your telecommunication needs.

 

Future of Telecommunication and Internet of Things

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For businesses, telecommunication is the primary driver. At present, roughly 3.2 billion people are in some way or the other connected to the Internet.

People share information amongst themselves in one form or the other by using the Internet. And with every passing day, that number is rising at a rocketing pace.

However, in the days to come, we are not likely to be alone in cyberspace.

Passive and active devices that have some computing and processing capabilities are going to be our companions in cyberspace and compete for space along with telecommunication. They will be communicating as well as sharing information just like us, but with more vigor and more perfection. They will get connected with each other in a complex manner to form a more vivid global mesh. In the days to come, the number of connected devices is likely to increase by a remarkable degree, making the competition between man and machines more intense in cyberspace.

Since the Internet is basically a global library and an unlimited resource for knowledge, the formats in which the information can be available is likely to increase tremendously.

Challenges to Telecommunication

In addition to telecommunication, video and audio formats, along with text are likely to increase in numbers. The concept of open Internet is likely to make way to a system wherein large information companies will control the cyber world. This is going to be a huge changeover, wherein, certain companies are going to decide what will be available on the Net and what will not be visible or usable. Moreover, they may even decide what the common people are supposed to do on the Net. That means the freedom of information that is there in the cyber world will no longer prevail.

These companies are going to utilize Internet as a premise to promote content marketing of their products and services. Since most VoIP telecommunication for individuals is free, advertisements may become the norm. They will block unwanted content, or content that they think will either do no good to them or have negative publicity for them. This is going to be huge transformation in the world of Internet in the days to come. Many sub-spaces may come into existence. Imagine a sub-space world where only automobiles are discussed, or discussions and interactions are limited to a geographical or political compulsions.

Moreover, with more and more people getting access to the Internet all over the world, the activity will increase and newer forms of telecommunication and information exchange will come into existence. More devices will be incorporated, more data formats will be invented and, nearly unlimited ways of processing and presenting information will be the norm.

With the decline in landlines, telecommunication over the Net is gaining momentum. Newer sectors of our daily lives are going to be governed by Internet and related web based technology. Starting with daily household activities like managing the electrical appliances through mobiles devices to controlling electronic accessories, everything will be done via the Internet. This will automatically raise our dependency on the Internet.

Other Forms of Communication

People will start expressing their opinions via Internet. The use of blogs will increase and so will the use of the websites of various kinds. The value of content and of the companies that manage content will increase.

Education will become more Internet-based. This will enable education to every person on Earth through distant education.

Even medical science will become more Internet-based. It will become possible to diagnose and treat people from remote places, with the help of remote sensing. Even complex surgeries will be possible via Internet-based technology.

In a nutshell, it will be the Internet that will play the most pivotal role in determining the type of life we will lead in the future. With the advent of cut throat technology, that change is already in the offing and the coming days are only going to see more influence of Internet based technology in our day to day life and in other aspects of our lives.

About Nebula Solutions

Nebula Solutions (originally Technology Convergence Group (TCG)) is a provider of business telecommunication solutions in the Dayton, Columbus, and Cincinnati, Ohio areas. Nebula Solutions is a Toshiba Platinum Dealer, which is the highest attainable certification level. Nebula Solutions supports all Toshiba telephone systems from the IPedge VoIP system all the way to Strata communication systems. At Nebula Solutions, our technicians are Toshiba certified and have an average of over 20 years of experience.

Call (888) 257-0955 today for all your telecommunication needs.

 

How Conferencing Solution Helps In Cost Cutting

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Technology has made this world a much smaller place. This is true in every aspect of our daily lives. The world of telecommunication is no exception. With the introduction of video conferencing technology, the world of telecommunication has got smaller and the process has become much faster. However, the most remarkable benefit that the latest conferencing solution has come up with is – massive cost cutting.

Over the last few years, the advent of newer communication technologies has made way for path breaking video conferencing technology as well. This has been possible through instant messaging and calls. A respectable percentage of population use phone conferencing and video conferencing services. Side by side, business organizations all over the world have also caught on this changing trend of conferencing solution to not only enhance the versatility of their communication system, but to reduce the costs involved.

Let us discuss how the latest conferencing solution helps in reduction of cost.

Rapid Outreach Through Conferencing Solution

Arguably, one of the most remarkable benefits of the latest video conferencing is the speed at which critical information can be put across from one end to the other. Now, in a business scenario, where the market is pregnant with cut throat competition, this contributes massively to cost cutting. This helps in achieving goals and sales quotas, deadlines and so on. This entire concept of being able to access the other end point of communication line quickly reduces the cost involved by a considerable extent.

Another noted aspect of cost reduction is that due to this fast access and ability of communication, it becomes possible to hold virtual meetings. This means that individuals involved in the meeting including the managers, employees, associates and other stake holders are able to communicate with each other from remote places regardless of their respective locations.

Optimization of Business Operations

A sizeable proportion of communication within a business scenario takes place through emails at present. In fact, it is the fastest mode of communication, when it comes to sending and receiving emails and other documents. However, emails can at times be misconstrued or wrongly interpreted. This could hurt your communication.

Modern video conferencing solution makes sure that business leaders can ensure that their colleagues and managers are able to have face-to-face communication. This helps to get a stronghold of the business strategies and deliverables in a professional manner. The practice also keeps the probability of miscommunication and lack of understanding at bay. This, understandably, increases the speed of the business flow, thus mitigating the cost involved by a considerable extent.

Last but not the least, the latest trend of video conferencing solution helps reduction of the carbon footprint for alleviating quite some negative effects. Businesses tend to attract these negative effects from the environment and the ambiance surrounding the business. One of the most significant negative effects is the need of executives to travel long distance, simply because of an ‘out-of the-place’ location of a business. While this will invariably increase the cost of business, a successful implementation of VoIP-based video conferencing technology will significantly reduce the need of that travel. This can very well be termed as an eco-friendly improvement, which contributes drastically to the reduction of the cost involved.

From the above examples, it can very well be said that this new technology helps in cost cutting of the modern businesses, irrespective of the scale. Businesses, as a result of this, are trying out various ways of implementing this new technology, to make use of this newest cost cutting technique in the fullest way.

About Nebula Solutions

Nebula Solutions (originally Technology Convergence Group (TCG)) is a provider of business telecommunication solutions in the Dayton, Columbus, and Cincinnati, Ohio areas. Nebula Solutions is a Toshiba Platinum Dealer, which is the highest attainable certification level. Nebula Solutions supports all Toshiba telephone systems from the IPedge VoIP system all the way to Strata communication systems. At Nebula Solutions, our technicians are Toshiba certified and have an average of over 20 years of experience.

Call (888) 257-0955 today for all your telecommunication needs.

 

How To Keep Conferences Productive

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Conference CallsIt is really strange to learn that conference calls, which have become indispensable part of corporate life, are also the most ignored communication tools. Conference calling might not be the highlight of your day but if you are not able to handle it effectively then it will definitely hamper your productivity and will also be a big waste of time. It is not really easy to keep conference calls extremely engaging and productive and you must have already found it the hard way when you found one of your colleagues sleeping through a call. Conference calls are the only way you can collaborate effectively with all your employees, given that nowadays every organization has a good mix of mobile employees and the ones who are located at head offices or branches. You might not get things perfectly done during a conference call but then you can always use the following tips that will help you keep the calls engaging and productive.

Keep The Conference List Short

It is not very surprising to find surveys revealing that 90% of the people participating in any conference call actually do not enjoy the meetings! Now, this is some statistics to ponder upon when we add so much importance to conference calling. As a business leader or owner, you will need to consider the interest as well as the need of participant in a call. Try to include the people who really need to be in the call and the rest can be informed about the agenda and minutes of the meeting via an email. If a mail can do the trick then there is no need of preparing a long list of participants – get those only who matter and really need to be a part of the discussion. Also consider the cost factor associated with including higher number of participants – shorter list will cost lesser.

Prepare before participating

Every meeting has an agenda and you will need to decide and distribute the agenda for the conference call among all the participants. Every participant must be aware about the issues that would be taken up during the meeting. An early preparation in the form of data points or other statistical cues can make the discussion more interesting. You can use some other collaboration tools where you can share the data during conference calls so that everyone has something in front of them to refer to.

Arrange your data and files prior to starting a conference

People often don’t come prepared with the necessary files or documents and this leaves them scrambling while the other participants are kept waiting. You should ensure that every member has their relevant files and folders in an easily accessible location. Use real time file syncing and sharing tools so that all the participants can refer and share the files during the meeting.

Use the latest Technology

In case you still connect all the participants via a phone call then it is time that you get a conferencing solution. These solutions can help you to carry out video or voice conferencing real quickly. You will also be able to share and transfer files on a real time basis by using the integrated tools that come along with latest conferencing solutions. Video conferencing can turn the meetings really productive as all the participants will be aware about the camera and the conference calls can turn out to be as productive as the face to face meetings.

Stay Focused in the Conference

People often tend to lose focus during a conference call and that leads to different types of confusion. The key to a successful video or audio conference is to stay focused. You can begin by not digressing from the agenda of the meeting and in case any of the other participants do that, you can then come in and remind him of the agenda. Every participant will start loving the conferences if it turns out to be productive and focused on the subjects of concern.

About Nebula Solutions

Nebula Solutions (originally Technology Convergence Group (TCG)) is a provider of business telecommunication solutions in the Dayton, Columbus, and Cincinnati, Ohio areas. Nebula Solutions is a Toshiba Platinum Dealer, which is the highest attainable certification level. Nebula Solutions supports all Toshiba telephone systems from the IPedge VoIP system all the way to Strata communication systems. At Nebula Solutions, our technicians are Toshiba certified and have an average of over 20 years of experience.

Call (888) 257-0955 today for all your telecommunication needs.

 

 

Unified Communications – What, How and Benefits

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Unified CommunicationsBusinesses thrive because of their communication and it would be really unwise to rely only on one communication system (in this case your telephone system) for getting all the work done. Let us look at a snapshot of a modern workplace:

  1. Your employees have a phone on their desk
  2. They have their workstations loaded with a variety of business applications
  3. Their Smartphones or mobile phones are within reach

Now, don’t you think it would be great if all these communications tools were integrated on a common platform? This is precisely what Unified communications do! It is the latest communication system that lets your employees receive and respond to all forms of communications from one device.

Unified Communications

Unified communications consolidates different types of communication that are exchanged via one or multiple networks. In layman’s terms Unified Communications is the technology that integrates the most frequently used tools on a common platform. Every employee in a modern workplace communicates via mail, SMS, telephone calls, video conference and instant messaging. All these communication tools can be easily integrated into a single system, which would then allow the messages to be delivered to the individuals, irrespective of the medium they use.

Unified communications is a holistic solution that facilitates the integration of video, voice as well as data into one communication system. This is a unique service that helps to stay in touch with anyone at any point of time. It bundles all the communication tools like video conferencing, instant messaging, text messaging and presence into a single service. Thus, when your employees are working from home, they can still participate in the video conferences, receive voicemails and check whether their colleagues are available at their desks for taking calls or not.

Benefits of Unified Communications

Here are a few simple yet powerful benefits of Unified Communications:

A big time and Money Saver: Unified communication can save a lot of time and money. Your employees will be able check any client or vendor communication from any device of their choice. For instance, if a civil engineer is working in a remote sight, he can easily check his mails, answer voicemails and even attend a video conference all by using his laptop, tablet or even his smartphone.

Voice messaging will become really easy as UC will help your employees to record, retrieve, relay and even forward the email messages and voicemail from one common place. This will helps them to access the messages and solve problems, irrespective of whether they are in the office or working from home.

Not only sharing of phone numbers will become really easy with UC but also temporary relocation to other workstation. They do not even have give up their phone numbers or personal identity while shifting to other workstation.

Syncing your desk phone, home phone, remote phone and even your mobiles with the phone transfer and message waiting features is simplified with UC. Dynamic extension gives a great edge to the callers who would be able to reach the executives of your company, irrespective of their location. Your employees too will be able to connect to the clients and co-workers without worrying about their location.

Desk-to-desk video conferencing is the biggest benefit of using Unified Communications as it facilitates real time access to data for better collaboration with customers or co-workers.

Delays or absence will not impede the productivity of your employees. They will be able to use features like conferencing, voicemail and other features while working from their homes.

About Nebula Solutions

Nebula Solutions (originally Technology Convergence Group (TCG)) is a provider of business telecommunication solutions in the Dayton, Columbus, and Cincinnati, Ohio areas. Nebula Solutions is a Toshiba Platinum Dealer, which is the highest attainable certification level. Nebula Solutions supports all Toshiba telephone systems from the IPedge VoIP system all the way to Strata communication systems. At Nebula Solutions, our technicians are Toshiba certified and have an average of over 20 years of experience.

Call (888) 257-0955 today for all your telecommunication needs.

 

 

Cloud Telephony Security: Why you Need Not Worry.

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Cloud Telephone_SecurityRecent surveys have come up with an interesting data on cloud – 54% of the businesses do not avail cloud based services because they are either worried about security on cloud or do not have any knowledge about the security issues. The blame thus falls upon us for having failed to inform businesses about cloud security.

Lack of Information

Businesses around the world never received proper and timely information about cloud and when it comes to large scale businesses, the lack of information is glaring. Cloud can actually turn business processes extremely efficient by leveraging data and communication while eliminating the needs of buying and maintaining hardware. Investment on hosted and cloud solutions can actually help you complete typical communication and IT tasks within a few hours rather than dragging the same for weeks.

The Need for Security

Security has always been a concern for the general public like you and me because, when it comes to security, we always tend to rely more upon hardware than software. However, this is not at all true and there is no evidence supporting such a belief. Whenever you decide to switch to the cloud (for the existing data or for the office phone system) then you will definitely come up with questions pertaining to security and safety. Cloud security is always at the hands of the service provider. Thus, it is imperative that the service providers take all the measures to ensure proper security.

Misplaced Confidence?

An interesting data about the IT professionals is that about 85% of them are confident about being provided a secure environment by their cloud provider. However, there are another 15% of IT professionals who have certain concerns like the few mentioned below:

  • Business interruptions or system downtime
  • Data loss or exposure during transfer to/from cloud
  • Data encryption issues
  • Physical security of data centers
  • Vulnerability of shared technology
  • Unwanted and malicious activity by the privileged administrators or insiders at the cloud service providers
  • Identifying or authenticating users
  • Assessment and comparison cloud providers
  • Legal or regulatory compliance requirements

The reasons why majority of the businesses are switching to the cloud for both their hardware and software requirements are shown below.

Cost – Moving to the cloud often helps a company save a lot of money that they would otherwise spend on maintenance and upgrades. You will be able to avail the managed services once the software or hardware is put into a data centre. This will reduce your overheads by quite a few notches. For instance, you will never have to worry about the electricity costs at your office as the cloud service provider would take care of the maintenance needs for a fixed monthly cost.

Resiliency – every data centre has three different types of power backup i.e. traditional main line, UPS battery backup, and a generator. This helps your communication or other system on the cloud to be up at any time of the day. In case of any issues, multiple network providers will be able to provide you full redundancy. Some data centers have symmetrical backups in other centers, sometimes even in other countries. Issues such as earthquakes, storm, and dust are all considered for the location.

Space – Your telephone equipments along with the needed servers can take up a big part of your office space. However, when you move everything to the cloud, you will be able to free up the space taken up by your communications room. The freed up space can then be used for other business purposes.

Security on the cloud might be a big issue for some of the business owners but the above reasons is good enough for you to leave those worries to the providers. Cloud technology and its security issues are being resolved quickly, so you can safely move to the cloud and enjoy its advantages.

About Nebula Solutions

Nebula Solutions (originally Technology Convergence Group (TCG)) is a provider of business telecommunication solutions in the Dayton, Columbus, and Cincinnati, Ohio areas. Nebula Solutions is a Toshiba Platinum Dealer, which is the highest attainable certification level. Nebula Solutions supports all Toshiba telephone systems from the IPedge VoIP system all the way to Strata communication systems. At Nebula Solutions, our technicians are Toshiba certified and have an average of over 20 years of experience.

Call (888) 257-0955 today for all your telecommunication needs.