I recently made a very unpleasant discovery with my current phone system support agency. As a little background, we moved our infrastructure to a Voice over IP (VoIP) solution about a year and a half ago, and have found it a wonderful productivity tool. We have been able to streamline branch operations and gain insight into call volumes and patterns, whereas before we would just have to guess.

We originally started the process with a very solid consultant, and ended up having to switch servicing agencies due to some logistical issues. The servicing agency was quite adept at handling the issues, and shortly thereafter, the support plan started to come up for renewal.

As usual, I asked my provider to send me a copy of their service level agreement (SLA) for review. This allows me to understand what I’m buying and what expectations they have. Usually, these items are identified in a sales process, but due to the circumstances of the move, this was not the case. In short, my new servicing provider had different terms for than my previous provider.

So here’s the rub, even though my company is paying for service and support, the verbiage indicates than any settings changes, adds, moves, or changes will be subject to additional charges at the hourly billable rate.

Part of the reason I bought a VoIP system was its flexibility in allowing my internal support team to handle changes as we needed to. According to this SLA, I could be charged if I make any changes that inadvertently cause problems.

Additionally, this company does not include support for Windows Updates. While I understand that some systems updates wreak havoc on proprietary solutions built on Windows platforms, but this now forces me to choose whether I should leave my system out of date and vulnerable to attack from malicious parties or incur charges should I follow Microsoft’s own recommended update schedule.

I’m now caught in the middle between Microsoft and a line of business solution - my phone system - which is crucial to our daily operations.

What are your thoughts on this?

I have some more conversations with the executives at my service provider, and I will keep you posted on how things turn out. By the way, this is the same company this post was about too, What’s in a Checkbox.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

Just what is it you think you are trying to sell me?

In my role with the company, I am not only responsible for day-to-day operations in our customer-facing technology group, but I am responsible for internal technology initiatives as well. This would include all infrastructure between several different branch locations, as well as contract negotiations with partners, vendors, and service providers.

So I received a phone call today from a local voice and data service provider requesting an audience to tell me about their offerings. I let the call go to voicemail because I wanted to hear the elevator speech as to why I should listen to this person - let’s call her Nancy.

So, Nancy leaves a message informing me that her company provides both data and voice services for company’s just like us all over.

OK, so far this is fine. It’s the same as everyone else, but fine.

Next, Nancy goes on to inform me of an all encompassing voice and data solution that I may not be aware of called a T-1…

Let me tell you, if I don’t know what a T-1 is, then I must’ve pulled one heck of a snow-job on the President and Owner of my company… In reality, if I don’t know what this is I should be fired.

Come on, I provide solutions for my customers every minute of my life, and here you are not only informing me how uneducated you are, but not selling me on what I want to here.

What is that you may ask?

How are you going to help me solve my business problems and satisfy my customer needs - that’s what!

So, 30 seconds into the voicemail message, Nancy is fired. She’s not even getting to first base! Take a lesson from this and apply it - please!

Just what’s in a checkbox? That is the question I was asking myself after 6+ hours and 5 engineers finally figured out 1 little checkbox needed to be unchecked for an entire phone system to start working.

The Backstory:

I was working on consolidating some call center queues last night to merge 2 of our call groups together. This involved running some Windows updates on the voicemail server.

Well, I started noticing some strange behavior like phones couldn’t download the configuration when rebooted and our call manager software on our workstations were flaking out - badly.

The Discovery:

It went from bad to worse Monday morning when I started by calling our partner’s technical support. Within about an hour we were bumping up to vendor support, and the vendor then bumped up to tier 3 support.

We had about 5 engineers and support personnel working on the issue, and our poor office staff trying to field calls from customers stating they couldn’t leave voicemails and were getting dropped.

The Find:

After looking at everything from just about every angle, the tier 3 support engineer asked why we were getting this Windows login prompt when trying to access a web portal to manage the phone system. At this point, we were at the point of curtly replying, “It’s your phone system, why don’t you tell us…”

Needless to say, I decided to take the reigns and look in Internet Information Services (IIS). For those of you who are not as familiar with Microsoft’s offering, there are a few different levels of security. I noticed 2 of the 3 were checked, which just didn’t look right.

I decided to wing it, because what did I have to lose? I unchecked integrated authentication in favor of anonymous and did an IISreset command. The thought was the phone web-management interface had its own security, so we didn’t need another layer.

The Fix:

Magically, everyone started being able to use their voicemail and call manager software. It was as if someone had opened a door and information just started flowing. I really couldn’t believe it.

Of course the vendor blamed us - or me more specifically for checking the box in the first place because there was just no way any Microsoft patch could’ve done that.

The Lessons:

1. Don’t underestimate the power of the small things in life.
2. If you are going to build your systems on top of other systems, you better know both.
3. Don’t tell me I can’t run Windows updates because then you are underwriting not patching security vulnerabilities. How about keeping up (refer to rule number 2.
4. Next time, try pulling the thumb instead of pointing the finger.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

I have just spent the past 3 weeks working with my firewall vendor’s technical support trying to extend our corporate VoIP network to our branch offices.  It was suppose to be a simple thing and only require a few clicks of the mouse…

Let me start by saying a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone system is a wonderful solution to expand the corporate phone system into branch offices and finally connect corporate associates with branch associates. This helps with productivity as call groups can be rerouted without a lot of hassle and phone messaging systems can usually be integrated with e-mail messaging systems, such as Microsoft Exchange. The best thing is technology prices have made a VoIP solution affordable for the SMB.

The challenge is that it does require a higher degree of technical skill to handle a multi-site solution and making some things work can be very tricky. Although many people claim maintaining a VoIP phone system is usually less maintenance, this is not entirely true. The adds, moves, and changes are much easier - in fact just about anyone can be trained to do this. It is the expansions that can get you stuck in the mud. Additionally, several different vendors must often be involved, because a VoIP phone system lives on top of several other layers. This is not a bad thing, but just a simple fact to be aware of.

After spending a little while on the phone with our vendor support for the VoIP phone system, we quickly came to the conclusion there were some configuration issues in our firewall routing - the phones couldn’t talk to each other. The strangest thing was we could place all calls from each branch office back to corporate, but the branch offices could not talk with one another without dialing an outside line.

After working almost 3 weeks with the firewall vendor’s technical support, the engineer stops today and asks us why we didn’t want to configure it another way versus what we were trying to do? I stopped dead in my tracks and put my head in my hand. Why didn’t I think of this 2 weeks ago? More importantly why didn’t he recommend this 2 weeks ago when we were beating our heads against the wall fruitlessly attempting to make a certain configuration work?

Here are the lessons I took away from all of this: Flip the problem on its side and look at it differently, ask other exports for their insight, and don’t be afraid to ask, “What are you trying to accomplish?’ By asking the right questions up front in your problem-solving session or sales call with a customer — you might just save you and your customer a lot of time and be the hero!