I’ve been quite busy with work during the holidays. I had a huge mandate to complete for January 4th. This doesn’t mean I’m always at the office. I’m always looking for new way to make my office more mobile.
This is why I’ve been using an IP Telephony service (from Ubity in Montreal) for a year now. With such a service, you can plug your phones anywhere there’s an Ethernet jack.
Location, location
The location where I’m at doesn’t matter. I could be in Mexico, in Europe, wherever and when I use my phone, it’s my office phone calling locally from Montreal.
So, I have a phone plugged in at my office, I have one at home and I have another one at my cottage. When the phone rings these 3 phones will all ring at the same time and I can answer like I was at the office. When I call someone, I always look as if I was at the office. I can be at my cottage and answer as if I was at the office after a day of skiing.
Not only that, I also have software phone support. So, when travelling, I can use my laptop at the hotel to make calls: I just plug in my iPhone headphones (which as a microphone) and I still appear as being in the office when returning calls from clients!
I’ve also installed a VoIP application on my iPhone called iSip. Unfortunately, it does not allow to make calls over the 3G network yet. It only supports Wi-Fi. The cool thing is I can be having a glass of port and smoking a cigar on my terrace and use the phone to call back clients or partners while still looking as if I’m at the office!
The day I’ll move my office, I just need to plug the phone somewhere else and I’m instantly ready to make and answer calls.
Features
This kind of service has all the usual telephony and corporate voicemail features for an affordable price. Calls in North America are free (1000 minutes per months) and calls to countries the other side of the Ocean are ridiculously cheap. On top of that I have features such as “find me” where in my corporate voicemail, people can press a button in my inbox to find me. They get to speak their names while the service calls my cell phone. Then, when receiving the call on my cell phone, after listening to who’s calling, I can press a button to accept or ignore the call.
The downside is I’m extremely reachable. But I often need to be.
The upside is that I can enjoy the pleasures of life a bit more and work where it’s more practical and enjoyable while looking like I’m never leaving my office and even sleeping there!