Phones feature prominently this weekend.
First, I have to finish up some VOIP phone provisioning for work. Well, it’s not first — I actually did my own stuff first.
One of the family businesses has gotten a lot more serious, and it was time to set up some proper infrastructure for it. Some of the web stuff happened yesterday. Given that we have a proper payment gateway now, we need proper contact information to go on peoples’ credit card bills. I don’t think anyone really wants their personal phone number on that, so off to VOIP.ms to set up some infrastructure.
The nice thing about VOIP.ms is that you can get set up with less than a CAD5 commitment. I grabbed local and toll-free DIDs, set up a couple of SIP accounts and call forwards to mobile phones, a time condition to gate things to voice mail outside of office hours, a ring group to allow either of us to take the call, “press 1 to accept” on the call so we can let it go if it’s not a good time or we’re in a position where we can’t talk, and a few other bits of scaffolding.
I’m still on the fence about whether to handle things primarily through SIP soft phones or forwards to our mobile phones. The nice thing about the SIP soft phones is that it maintains the company CID info when you call out — mobile phones, not so much. The ability to turn off the SIP soft phone and still keep regular, personal phone calls going is another big deal. It’ll take some experimenting to see whether it’ll work in practice, though.