RingCentral Internet Phone System, a Boon to Urban Real Estate

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The economic slowdown in the US might have affected realtors as a whole but Urban Real Estate is making use of RingCentral Internet phone system as an innovative tool to manage its company-wide phone communications, thereby boosting business while keeping down the overhead costs. RingCentral has replaced the conventional premise-based office phone system, to connect on-the-go brokers with customers, prospects and colleagues.

Cost containment for communications vendors and their carrier customers can be achieved on two fronts.

Over the past decade, consumer debt has surged at an alarming pace. The likelihood of recovering debt, however, decreases with each passing day.

RingCentral provides an Internet phone system for small business and offers full-access to core small business phone services and helps improve productivity for more than 50,000 customers worldwide. Urban Real Estate works with individuals and corporate investors that buy real estate in the downtown Chicago area.

The owner of the brokerage, Matt Farrell, attributes the company’s success in part to a web-centric business model because 80 percent of real estate shoppers begin their search online. Urban Real Estate leverages the Internet for business productivity and lead generation.

They needed a system that would not compromise on the connectivity, a very essential criteria for serving their customers and also to blend well with their web-based business model. The RingCentral Internet phone system gave them the option to save money and, at the same time, provides business services like multiple extensions with voicemail, professionally recorded greetings, and the ability to forward calls to any phone.

An efficient system was required for the business as many of the company’s real estate brokers were always on the mobile. Farrell explains, “Phone calls are critical in the real estate industry, but too many brokers rely on just their mobile phones. They miss calls and sound unprofessional.” Farrell continues, “By using RingCentral’s Internet phone system, we have a competitive advantage – our team relies on RingCentral to manage communications no matter where our busy brokers are located at any given time.” He claims that RingCentral allowed him to setup and customize the system within minutes on the web.

Urban Real Estate’s brokers can be accessed anywhere through the system as each one of them is provided with an extension on Urban Real Estate’s RingCentral phone system. Clients calling Urban Real Estate perceive that the entire team is working from one location with one phone number. The RingCentral service also includes Internet Fax, which is a significant communications tool for the real estate industry. With Internet Fax, brokers can send and receive faxes over the Internet through an online interface or email.

RingCentral Reports Record Sales in Recent Weeks

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Even in tough economic times, there are always some winners to be found. And this time one of those winners appears to be hosted telecom services and companies that offer them. According to reports, an SMB-focused service provider named RingCentral Inc. reports record sales in recent weeks.

The company manages all of a customer’s phone, mobile, fax and email communications with a single phone number and an online control center. It combines a toll-free or local number with advanced call management, PBX, voice mail and Internet fax, enabling customers to set up multiple extensions with voice mail, automatically screen, forward and place calls, take voice mail, send and receive faxes, and receive message alerts.

According to the company’s Web site: “So far, more than 40,000 businesses have tapped into the power of RingCentral, and thousands more are signing up each month.”

Of course, hosted services are a way for businesses of all sizes to lower their capex and opex costs by allowing the service provider to assume both the upfront equipment and installation costs and the ongoing management and maintenance of said equipment and the service it supports.

Virtualized fax cuts costs

In data centers around the world, the traditional reality of one application per server is changing. Pressures to cut costs and streamline operations have brought organizations face to face with the expense and difficulty of managing a constantly growing number of machines running different applications and operating systems, often with different database requirements. Data centers are running out of space for all of the servers acquired over the years, yet hardware is underutilized and disaster recovery is complicated. Energy costs are skyrocketing and server administration expenses keep rising.
Ironically, some of the best steps small and medium-sized business can take to improve operations can actually contribute to these problems. Automating core business processes with solutions like fax servers produces huge gains in efficiency and sustainability by helping organizations quit paper. But process automation also generates massive amounts of data to be stored, backed up and recovered – which means more hardware and associated costs. And the need to power and maintain all the machines to handle that data presents a challenge to green business initiatives.
Taking migration to IP a step further
This paradox may explain in part why sales of Internet-based fax server solutions are growing at a rate of more than 50 percent, according to fax industry analyst Davidson Consulting, gaining predominance over conventional fax board-based solutions. Together with the emergence of virtualization software products like VMware, Hyper-V and Xen as valuable tools to run multiple applications and boost hardware utilization, Fax over IP provides the means for completely virtualized fax systems, and it addresses the expense of line charges and other costs associated with public switched telephone network infrastructures.
Virtualization coordinates access to a single piece of hardware, like a server computer, so that multiple guest applications (including fax server software) can share the hardware without interfering with each other. Fax server solutions can seamlessly be implemented in a virtual machine environment without hardware by integrating fax with Voice over IP networks.
Fax virtualization offers organizations significant benefits of increased efficiency and cost control in hardware utilization, data center resource management, energy consumption, administration and disaster recovery. Working with its fax server customers, Esker has found that virtualization typically reduces costs associated with fax operations by as much as 40 percent. Running fewer servers means less capital expense. And with virtualized fax there is no need for downtime during system maintenance, helping ensure business continuity.
Going boardless
FoIP enables organizations to take advantage of fax virtualization benefits without the need for fax hardware. Fax software such as Dialogic Brooktrout SR140 leverages VoIP architectures to fax-enable users and applications, providing FoIP capabilities by integrating fax technology with IP networks. Fax servers that play well with the SR140 technology thrive in the virtualized environment because there are no hardware dependencies and the fax server solution can be enabled on every workstation with no additional costs.
To address the expense and inefficiency of traditional faxing, fax server solutions leverage boardless fax technology and virtual machine software environments to offer compelling cost and administration time savings.
Success factors
SMBs moving to a virtualized fax server solution have several key factors to consider. First, traditional fax boards do not support virtualization. Companies need to make sure their fax servers have been tested with virtualization software components. And although virtualization reduces the amount of administrative work necessary for hardware, it will not make the need for system administration go away. System administration is still required for guest operating systems, which makes it important for the fax server to provide versatile capabilities for management and reporting. Also, applications may have multiple machines that need to access the same data. For example, an SAP customer master database is accessed by SAP applications as well as the fax server software and other business systems. This underscores the need for a fully capable fax server.
When these considerations are taken into account, fax server virtualization offers SMBs the potential to improve reaction time, provide a cost-effective means of disaster recovery preparedness, dramatically reduce network administrative costs, support sustainability and deliver significant cost savings.

eFax Available for Vista 64-bit OS

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The updates extend the functionality of eFax’s popular Internet fax application to include all current Microsoft OS versions. eFax® announced today compatibility of its free eFax Messenger Internet fax application with Microsoft® Windows® 7 32-bit, 64-bit, and Vista 64-bit operating systems. eFax Messenger makes it easy to create, annotate, sign, send, and print faxes from any computer.
The new OS versions now make eFax Messenger available for Windows 7, Vista, XP, and Windows 2000 32-bit operating systems, as well as Mac® 32-bit operating systems. eFax Messenger is a tried and tested Internet fax software that gives users full-featured fax management via a user-friendly interface. Among its many features, eFax Messenger allows faxes to be sent, viewed, and printed directly from within the application. In addition, fax history, drafts, and sent faxes can be easily viewed and referenced.
“eFax Messenger has proven to be a popular application for extending eFax’s functionality beyond basic online sending and receiving of faxes,” said Mike Pugh, vice president, marketing, j2 Global, Inc. “The ability to mark an online fax with an ‘approved’ or ‘received’ stamp, or with a customized stamp like your own signature, really makes a difference when working in a mobile environment or going green.”
eFax is a pioneer in the fax business, with a string of technology and business firsts dating back to 1988. The company’s global network recently grew to 3,500 cities worldwide, on six continents.

Medical Practices Reduce Operating Costs Says Patient

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PatientNOW, a leading electronic medical records (EMR) and practice management software company, announced today that PatientNOW’s Medical Records Studio and Medical Spa Studio solutions have been enhanced with a fully integrated fax system.

Medical practices can now send and receive documents, such as prescriptions or orders from within PatientNOW’s practice management system using any workstation, laptop, or tablet in the practice.

This fully HIPAA compliant fax solution allows medical practices to send and receive faxes from PatientNOW’s software without additional hardware or dedicated phone lines.

Medical practices can reduce operating costs by removing dedicated fax phone lines and disposing of fax equipment that may break or wear out. Dedicated fax numbers are moved to PatientNOW’s Fax Service and all faxes are sent and received via the medical practice’s Internet connection.

The practice’s electronic mail system is not burdened using PatientNOW’s Fax Service as other fax solutions use email to send and receive faxes causing added strain and maintenance to the email system.

The practice’s medical staff can easily check the status of any outgoing fax by referring to PatientNOW’s Task Manager to indicate if the sent fax was received successfully. In addition, staff members can view any previously sent or received fax via the PatientNOW Fax Service archive.

For a limited time, medical practices can signup for a free PatientNOW Fax Service 30 day trial.

For additional information on PatientNOW’s Fax Service or to see a demonstration, contact Race Proffitt or visit PatientNOW.