Fans of Tech » VOIP

Zaplee: the $5-a-month phone system for your business

Jason — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:30:39 +0000

When it comes to setting up your small business, there are a great number of things to worry about. Among them? Implementing a phone system for use by a small, handful of employees or by vast quantities of call center drones… or any combination of employees in between.

There are a great number of sophisticated VOIP solutions out there. You can go the Microsoft route and implement a “unified communications” suite like Microsoft Office Communications Server. Similarly, you can go with a richly-complex Windows Server-based solution like ShoreTel. If you’re a true rogue, you can alternatively go the open-source route and opt for a Linux-based phone system like Asterisk.

Of course, there’s always an online solution that’ll save you from investing in either hardware or software. (For the most part, at least.) Enter Zaplee. Zaplee integrates with your existing Skype account(s) to provide you with an easy way to manage departments, extensions, greetings, forwarding, complex routing, etc.

Getting everything setup, at least according to the site, is a pretty straight-forward, 4 or 5-step process: download the software, setup the extensions, setup departments, record greetings and then, well, go live. Check out the Zaplee feature tour to get an overview of how the system looks and works.

As a side note, there are two flavors of Zaplee: the $5-a-month (for unlimited users) solution that you can manage from your desktop, alongside the Skype software. The other option, Zaplee On-Demand, at $10-a-month (also for unlimited users) is entirely Web-based.

Overall, it’s a pretty impressive, quick and easy way to get a phone system setup in your office. Sure, you might very well outgrow it eventually and you might decide that you’re better off with one of the aforementioned paths I mentioned above (OCS/ShoreTel/Asterisk) but, then again, Zaplee might just do everything you need… and at a ridiculously-low price.

What say you? What voice system have you decided upon/deployed for your office?

V4S, Free Web Voice Messaging from Orb Networks

Jason — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 14:09:26 +0000

V4S is a new product from Orb Networks which allows users of the product to send voice messages to family and friends from within a Web browser or directly from within the Skype interface. Notifications of new messages can be received by e-mail or SMS and thus can be played wherever you’re at. The product is free and so it already beats Skype’s Voicemail product, in my humble opinion. Courtesy of their FAQ page, here’s some technical specs that you may have been wondering about:

You can listen to your messages on ANY Web-connected device with a streaming audio player (e.g. Windows, Real, QuickTime, MPlayer, mobile 3gp player supporting the streaming of .sdp files, etc.).

This means you can listen to your messages – without having to download ANYTHING onto these devices:

Windows PCs

Macs

Linux devices

Mobile phones (works great on Nokia Series 60 and Windows Smartphones)

PocketPCs (PalmOS devices do not yet have a streaming audio player)

Skype 2.0 BETA is here…

Jason — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 12:52:37 +0000

I found an article this morning at the Chicago Tribune stating that Skype will be releasing a BETA version of version 2.0 sometime today. Sure enough, they weren’t lying. (You never can tell with that Chicago Tribune……just kidding.) 2.0 is available for download now and you can find all of the new features and changes in the official Skype changelog.