February 21, 2012

Authored by: ShoreTel, Brilliantly Simple

Tom Hamilton, senior director of channel marketing, has been named one of CRN’s 2012 Channel Chiefs.

This prestigious list of the most influential and powerful leaders in the IT channel recognizes those executives directly responsible for driving channel sales and growth within their organization, while evangelizing and defending the importance of the channel throughout the entire IT Industry.

Highlights of the ShoreTel channel program over the past year include:

• Increased investment in lead generation and distribution across U.S. and several verticals including government, professional and banking sectors.
• Migration of lead management to Salesforce.com, making opportunity registration and management easier.
• Continued development of turnkey marketing and demand generation toolkits.
• Re-vamp of individual partner dashboards, providing comprehensive details on partner sales, customer satisfaction, TAC usage and investment in ShoreTel training/resources.
  • Introduction of new Learning Management System on-line course delivery, enabling partners to have more choices in maintaining their sales and technical knowledge investments.

For the ninth consecutive year, Channel Chiefs were selected by the CRN editorial team based on channel experience, program innovations, channel-driven revenue, and public support for the importance of IT Channel Sales.

Selected by CRN’s editorial staff, the 2012 Channel Chiefs list is featured in the February issue of CRN Magazine and will be featured online at www.crn.com.

“The 2012 Channel Chiefs list recognizes vendor executives dedicated to driving channel programs in the IT marketplace. Our annual Channel Chiefs issue is a must-read for IT solution providers evaluating new vendors or looking to expand solution offerings. These are the people, the products and the programs that any savvy solution provider needs to know. We congratulate this year’s Channel Chiefs for their stellar record of business innovation applaud them for their continued dedication to the partner community.”
- Kelley Damore, VP, Editorial Director, UBM Channel.

Labels: Awards, Channel Partners

Article source: http://blog.shoretel.com/2012/02/shoretels-tom-hamilton-recognized-as-one-of-crns-2012-channel-chiefs/

February 16, 2012

Authored by: Kezia Gollapudi, Product Marketing Manager

As the BYOD (bring-your-own-device) phenomenon for mobile devices gains momentum, Dual Persona, the ability to maintain separate identities on a single device, is also rising in popularity.

With ShoreTel Mobility, I not only get access to all the rich deskphone and UC capabilities on my favorite smartphone, but also the ability to keep my business and personal profiles separate. My business contacts see my desk phone number as the calls route through the enterprise, while my personal contacts see the cell phone number.

Here’s a quick look at how easy it is to keep my personal calls separate from business on my Android.

Labels: Enterprise Mobility

Article source: http://blog.shoretel.com/2012/02/dual-persona-for-your-smartphones/

February 14, 2012

Authored by: Dieter Rencken, Senior Product Manager

I recently had the opportunity to attend IT Expo in Miami Beach, Fl. This three-day seminar set out to provide in-depth information on UC apps – including SIP trunking, realtime video, Fax-over-IP, mobility and more.

My participation in panel discussions hosted by Ingate confirmed my belief that a focused security policy around UC is very important to all businesses. Daily reports of hacking and intrusions on the data side of the house no longer even get our attention, and with the rising prominence of SIP trunking as a new attack domain, this is topic that has to be taken seriously. 

Unfortunately the true facts are often covered or downplayed as a hacking incident can have really bad PR consequences for the target company or the equipment vendor through which the breach was accomplished.

One audience member gave an example that within a week of deploying SIP trunks with only a basic “SIP –aware” firewall they had seen their system compromised and costs of several thousand dollars had been run up.

Deploying SIP trunks with an enterprise Session Border Controller (like Ingate’s SIParator), as is common practice with ShoreTel systems, is a key component of a comprehensive UC system security plan.

Labels: Event, IP Phone Systems

Article source: http://blog.shoretel.com/2012/02/sip-trunking-at-it-expo/

February 15, 2012

Authored by: Maura Higgins, Director, Professional Services

The beauty and power of architecturally open systems is in the way they allow technologies to be combined, resulting in wholes much greater than the sums of their parts.

The ShoreTel Voice Forms IVR Application, a solution built via ShoreTel’s open software interfaces, allows callers to complete audio “forms” simply by speaking their answers one by one when prompted with questions. A resulting wave file contains their responses separated by “beep” delimiters and is delivered to designated ShoreTel voicemail boxes.   

ShoreTel customers such as South Shore Medical Center in Massachusetts designed their prescription refill process around this application. Patients call in their refill orders 24 hours a day and Medical Center administrators subsequently process these orders offline and very efficiently.

Taking technology combining a step further, bring in ShoreTel Innovation Network alliance member Mutare and their voice-to-text software. Mutare’s software can be used to translate voice form messages into text files that, in turn, can be processed to automatically create printed mailings, emails, or other written responses to requests – all without involving a single manual step!

Imagine the advantages of such a solution for a city visitors’ bureau that fields a large volume of phone requests for information every day. Automating responses to routine requests ensures that valuable human resources are applied to tasks not as easily handled by machines.

Since operational efficiency is paramount today’s competitive economy, most businesses cannot afford to *not* use technology to its best advantage and open systems make creative solutions possible.

Labels: Innovation Network, Professional Services

Article source: http://blog.shoretel.com/2012/02/wholes-greater-than-the-sums-of-their-parts/

February 14, 2012

Authored by: Liz Pedro, Customer Programs Manager

Cookie season is here!

The Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. is the largest voluntary organization of girls in the world – with a mission to build courage, confidence, and character and make the world a better place. The Girl Scouts of Northern California council includes over 47,000 girls and 32,000 adults.

The Girl Scouts of Northern California council was formed by a merger of five companies. The result was five different phone systems – most of them very old systems – that caused training and support challenges, not to mention the lack of integration. They evaluated many different phone systems and chose a ShoreTel solution, which included phones, ShoreTel Conferencing, ShoreTel VPN concentrator and plan to rollout ShoreTel Mobility.

They have seen many benefits, including:

• Saving money by leveraging ShoreTel conferencing and not having to use an external conference service.
• Ability for staff to stay more connected using ShoreTel features like extension assignment and call forwarding.
• Improved customer service by redesigning many business processes to allow customers to reach the groups they need and to answer all other incoming calls with a live person.
• Voice to text translations to a few mailboxes so they can respond quicker and with the right resource to help customers.

“Probably the biggest benefit we’ve seen is that we now have one system to support the entire company. This has unified our offices and helped our staff stay more connected.”
– Glenn Rogers, CIO, Girl Scouts of Northern California

For many of us we might be familiar with Girl Scouts because of their delicious cookies. Learn more about their 2012 cookie sale. Me – I’m partial to the Thin Mints.

Labels: Customer Experiences, Enterprise Mobility, VoIP Phone Systems

Article source: http://blog.shoretel.com/2012/02/girl-scouts-of-northern-california-unites-thanks-to-shoretel-solutions/