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Small Business Phone System. What Do?

Hello LTT Community.

 

So, I guess this is not ur usual request, but im looking for a thing to handle incoming calls at a small business I work at. We are a team of only about 4 people, and for the most part we are not in the office during 'normal' working hours. We do however have a phone in the office that a large number of calls go through to, mostly into an answering machine.

What we are looking for is a machine to ether ring normally or transfer calls to a mobile phone, depending on the time of day and/or if someone is in the office. So by default it will go strait to answering machine. We can set times of the day, e.i Monday to Friday, 10am to 5pm that it will re-route the call to a mobile phone. Or, if someone is in the office, they can manually change it is so that it rings as normal. Any other cool features that it can have would be awesome as well.

I have googled around, but have no idea what to actually google with most of my searches looking like 'call forwarding answer machine phone system' which does no produce much that I accutaly trust. Anyone got any thoughts for me? Even if its just a small computer with some softwear. 

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Ringcentral can do what you want. https://www.ringcentral.com/
 

I've used them before and they are pretty good, although their web interface for setting up things can be slightly confusing, they have a video and text database for helping you do things. And if you do need to call to do something specific, they've been helpful for me.

One cool feature is that if you get office phones from them, they can be moved anywhere there is an internet connection and still work fine with minimal effort. 

If you want to do it yourself, you can setup your own VoIP Server: https://www.freepbx.org/downloads/freepbx-distro/

 

If you do that, you'll need to find a company that you can get a trunk from. http://www.sip.us/ It's usually fairly cheap. If they only offer Cloud PBX service, you may as well use Ringcentral as that's what they offer.

After signing up for trunk service, the company will transfer your current number to them and so you can keep your same number. They should definitely be able to do that in most cases. Rarely, they cannot. Depends on who currently controls the number and local laws and stuff.

Then you'd have to set up your local server with the PBX software (can be FreePBX or wtv, there are lots of options) to connect to the trunk and handle the calls. 

Note this will use your internet as VoIP is an internet based utility effectively. You need like 1 Mbps down/up for four people (depends on quality of call among other things but generally that) at most 2.
 

† Christian Member †

For my pertinent links to guides, reviews, and anything similar, go here, and look under the spoiler labeled such. A brief history of Unix and it's relation to OS X by Builder.

 

 

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Thanks for your help. Have looked into all the options and I will probably give ring central a try. Hosting it myself seems like alot of hassle, and though I may learn how in time, a free trial sounds great. Cheers for the assistance!

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