Extension 437

Telecom questions

Here are some questions I want answers to:

1. How many phone lines are required per employee? One line per employee? One line for every five employees (this kind of thing obviously requires a PBX)?
2. Is it more cost effective to buy or lease a PBX? What about hosted PBX?
3. At what point is it more cost effective to use a PRI for voice instead of having analog lines? Or a T1 with half the channels for voice and half for data?
4. Can a very small organization with only one site save money with Internet telephony?
5. Can a small organization with multiple sites save money with Internet telephony?
6. When is frame relay a better choice for intersite data transport than a VPN over the public Internet?

Please comment if you have any answers for me. If I find my own answers I will add them here.

Error in my story on patching

Improve Security by Patching Windows could probably do with some updating, now that Windows XP SP2 is out. Re-reading it today, I noticed this sentence fragment:

"Your computer must be set to automatically dial out to the Internet when"

How could I leave the reader hanging like that?! Note to self: fix that up straightaway.

Changepoint Outlook Tools

What are these "Changepoint Outlook Tools," and can we use them?

Customer Support

I was dreaming about work again. It doesn't happen often, but this morning I woke up thinking about it.

What I was thinking today is how I have suggested that we need a tool to help us keep customer requests from getting lost. I periodically hear how we have taken a long time to get back to a client or prospect about this or that. Or sometimes we fail to get back to them at all. I don't think that there is a technical solution to every problem, but good tools can help.

In Consulting Services we have been talking for a long time about how we need a helpdesk tool to help us track requests for technical support from clients for whom we are providing direct technical assistance.

Within CompuMentor we use the Support Request features in Changepoint to track these sorts of things. I realized today that the version of Changepoint we are using includes a Client Portal. I'm not going to spend time looking into it right now, but I'll wager there are customer support tools built right in to a product we already have deployed. We just need to turn them on.

Software ONE: Charity licensing reseller

Microsoft has a list of resellers who participate in the Open Charity Licensing program. I have found that it is sometimes difficult to get information about the charity licensing from the vendors' Web site. CDW, for example, is listed in Microsoft's document, but just try and find anything on their site about it. Software ONE comes right out and advertises charity licensing on their home page, though. Susan Bradley of E-Bitz recommends them as a resource for nonprofit organizations. Oh, and she recommends TechSoup Stock, too.

One interesting note on the Software ONE site is this:

"Citrix^®, Computer Associates, Corel^®, FileMaker^®, Interact Commerce (ACT! ^®), Intuit^®, McAfee^®, Macromedia^®, Microsoft^®, Novell^®, and Trend Micro^® are offering Charity Pricing at this time.

Bug database for TechSoup

We use Changepoint internally at CompuMentor to track bugs in TechSoup.org. Our readers use the Site Feedback forum. What if we all could use the same system? A bug database that would track the status of issues and feature requests. Changepoint has some of the standard features for tracking requests, but it's not available to the public. I wonder if someday we could ues Onyx for this.