A recent report from The Work Foundation forecast that by 2020, 70% of people would work away from the office as often as they worked at a desk.
The upgrade is good news for businesses that have standardised on the Microsoft framework for instant messaging and presence. The optional Skype for Business plugin ensures TalkTalk Business Partners can now deliver enterprise-class voice within the Skype for Business platform, in a much simpler and cost-effective way.
The launch comes shortly after TalkTalk Business carried out research with Censuswide. It found that, of those that had adopted IP Voice telephony (including Hosted Voice), 31.7% had done so to provide more unified communications, while 28.6% had done so to improve productivity within their organisation. The introduction of the new UC features will help more businesses to achieve these goals by further bringing office, home and agile workers together under a single collaboration platform.
Key features of the TalkTalk Business Hosted Voice offering include:
•Flexibility for a mobile workforce: Allows employees to see the availability of people they want to contact, collaborate with and communicate to, by calling or through chat messages, regardless of location. It has been designed with a mobile workforce in mind, integrating easily into any smartphone ecosystem, covering Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Blackberry.
•Secure and scalable: Voice traffic is all encrypted as standard to provide peace of mind. Meanwhile, Hosted Voice is a cloud based service, meaning there’s no need for expensive on site PBX hardware.
•Easy to manage: Hosted Voice has its own intuitive self-service online portal, allowing users to manage their service and provide call reporting. Each employee requires only a single sign on to login to their desk phones, mobile applications and desktop client.
Employees can download the app directly from the Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Windows application stores, using the same login details as the Hosted Voice laptop/desktop soft client. This makes it secure and effortless for both employees and IT Services.
TalkTalk Business’ Hosted Voice platform is powered by Mitel, one of the world’s most trusted business communications providers, servicing more than two billion business connections and 60 million business users. As a platinum partner, TalkTalk Business has achieved the highest level of accreditation that Mitel offers to global partners, distinguishing those who represent the highest standards for Mitel’s solutions.
Guy Miller, Director of Trading, commented: “Businesses have long been looking for ways to improve their productivity while also providing much more flexibility for their increasingly mobile workforce. More and more firms are finding that for their employees work is an activity rather than a place to be. They expect to be able to work from any location with the same level of access and connectivity as if they were in the office.”
“With the introduction of the Unified Communication feature set to our Hosted Voice platform, TalkTalk Business is allowing Partners to cater for evolving working practices while also providing telephony which is secure and reliable. The great new features such as MiCollab and the Skype for Business plugin go beyond giving Partners capabilities to solve customers’ business challenges, they also provide a quick and simple way for the channel to offer exciting new services which they can gain greater margin on and offer across their wider customer portfolio.”