Your business VoIP phone system is probably the most important piece of technology in your home office. Not only should it be to create an efficient workspace, but it can help keep you safe during lockdown restrictions too.
Keeping your business VoIP phone system functional through lockdown restrictions can be difficult if you’re unfamiliar with its basic setup or if you have another person who normally deals with it. This post is for you!
Here are 11 tips to keep in mind when moving your business VoIP phone system to a home office during lockdown restrictions:
1. Your business VoIP provider has lockout security settings to prevent unauthorized access, so be sure the correct PIN number has been entered before trying to make any changes.
2. Just like other VoIP services, you need your business phone system to be connected to an Internet connection and a power source; both of these should be uninterrupted during lockdown restrictions as well as when making the move from your office location to home.
3. During lockdown restrictions, turn off or disconnect the equipment that connects your business phone system to other phones. This means any phones that are wired directly to the phone system should be switched off at their connection point, and any wireless handsets not in use need to be turned off or taken outside of range. If your phone system is connected to a fax machine, this should also be disconnected.
4. There may be one or more telephone company lines connected to your business phone system; these are the lines that provide service to all of the extensions. If at all possible, do NOT disconnect these lines during lockdown restrictions because doing so may cause you to lose service on some or all of your extensions (for landline phones at least).
5. Dial tone should be available on all lines connected to your business phone system during lockdown restrictions, so if you need to make changes (such as removing or adding an extension), do so with the least amount of extensions connected.
6. If you normally use call forwarding on your business VoIP phone system, this should work without fail during lockdown restrictions; however, if you usually use it for specific extensions, or if there are restrictions on call forwarding at the time, these might not be available.
7. Any existing phone numbers assigned to your business VoIP phone system will likely remain the same during lockdown restrictions; however, this is no guarantee that they won’t change because of changes with your telephone company, so you might have to contact your business VoIP provider for help in this regard.
8. If you want a home phone number added to any of your existing extensions that don’t already have one assigned, call your telephone company and ask which numbers can be ported. It may take a few days for a number transfer request from your current business VoIP provider to take effect, but it should be a relatively quick process in the end.
9. Don’t forget that during lockdown restrictions you might not have access to your phone system via laptop. That means you also won’t have access to its web interface at all, so you won’t be able to change your phone system settings from a computer.
10. Call forwarding won’t work if you usually use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) for remote access to your business VoIP phone system; a VPN will be another thing to connect when moving voice services during lockdown restrictions.
11. You normally have more control over your business VoIP phone system during lockdown restrictions if you have an advanced system with buttons dedicated to specific functions.
For example, the Cisco SPA 500 Series phone systems , which are popular in business VoIP service, offer dedicated function buttons for programming—so there is no need to use the touch-tone pad at all when making changes. The AT&T Partner VoIP System allows for a similar setup by using the dedicated dial pad feature.
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