Part One: Why FortiVoice? ... 1
Part Two: FortiVoice Features ... 7
Part Three: Phones, Software and More ... 32
Part Four: Qualifying the Customer, Qualifying the Site ... 46
Part Five: Installing and Configuring FortiVoice SMB Systems ... 56
Part Six: FortiVoice SMB Systems and VoIP ... 112
Part Seven: Troubleshooting FortiVoice SMB Systems ... 144
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Why FortiVoice?
Before we get into all the “how to’s” about FortiVoice systems, I want to talk about “why”. Why should you sell FortiVoice systems?
It’s the money!
It’s cash, pure and simple. We’ve sold over 100,000 of these products, most of them through resellers like you. Long-time resellers of ours know that you can make money selling the system, and you can deploy the system without all the costs associated with competing products.
If you sell telephony hardware today from other manufac-turers, you’ll find that FortiVoice will fit into your line-up for customers who are too small for your other products. For you, FortiVoice will ensure that you can capture customers who might otherwise slip away if you don’t have a solution. If you sell network stuff, you are definitely leaving money on the table if you don’t sell phones. Every one of your customers today uses telephones, and they’re buying them from someone. Why not you?
Plus, unlike with network security apparatus, phone systems generally sell with a phone for every user in the customer’s business. Those phone sales add up fast. FortiVoice can help you capture those sales, and that can double, triple or even quadruple your order size.
Big market segment
There is just no shortage of end-customers. The phone is an absolutely essential tool for every business in the world. And amazingly, the customer base is recession-proof. Obviously, individual businesses are not recession-proof, but the number of businesses has actually risen in the US in the last few years, according to Dun and Bradstreet, as you can see here.
And, there’s a ton of potential there. If you sell telephony products, you’re already aware of that. The hard part has always been reaching these businesses, particularly the smaller ones. The smaller businesses are a lot different than their bigger brothers and sisters, and the solutions available to them have traditionally been too expensive and too complicated for them or too dumbed down to deliver good features.
That’s where FortiVoice phone systems come in.
Top selling points: value
Here’s a look at what FortiVoice SMB systems do and why they’re the right system to help you land sales from your SMB customers. These are their major selling points. First up: FortiVoice SMB systems are all about value. As you probably know from the field, the number one thing you encounter when you’re trying to sell anything to a small business is a tight budget. Who’s ever heard of a small business with money to burn? The really small ones have owners who feel every cost as though it’s coming out of their own pockets, and none of them have a lot of cash to spare. This is more true today than ever.
Small businesses like a good bargain, and they’re suspicious of over-engineered products that cost a lot of money. But they’re not stupid. Most small businesses know that the cheapest solution isn’t always the best solution. What they’re really looking for is value. They want to know that what they buy will do what they need it to do at the lowest possible price.
Top selling points: features
Second is our feature set.
With our SMB systems, our goal is to deliver big business phone features at small business prices. Features that help small businesses improve their professional image, control costs and stay connected anywhere.
Whether your customer is a little two-man startup in a garage or a sophisticated multi-location operation, their FortiVoice system gives them the same features.
It’s all built-in. Everyone gets their own extension. Voicemail for everybody, and it includes voicemail to e-mail — now even the smallest company can receive and manage their voicemails from their e-mail. Auto attendants mean small business owners can give comprehensive options to callers, or even run two or three businesses off the same system with customized greetings for each. Remote extensions keep employees connected on their cell phones. Instead of calling an employee’s cell phone number, now customers can just call in and dial their extension.
And there’s more: multilingual operation, ring groups, dial-by-name directories, music on hold... and much more.
Top selling points: simplicity
So, FortiVoice has great value and great features for small and medium businesses. But the most important thing we build into every FortiVoice system isn’t a feature. It’s simplicity.
For small business customers, simplicity is a huge relief. Most of small business owners we deal with don’t know anything about phones or phone systems, and they don’t want to know. They’re too busy running their businesses, so they don’t have the time and they don’t have the inclination. Unlike most of the solutions offered by our competitors, FortiVoice systems are easy to understand, easy to buy and easy to use. That makes them easy to sell.
Top selling points: easy set-up
Part of our commitment to simplicity is that installing a FortiVoice SMB system is easy. If you’re used to selling and installing the traditional phone systems on the market, you’ll put fewer of your resources into getting your customers up and running. Our smallest systems can even be installed by your customers themselves, which means you can still capture the sale for customers who are so small they balk at installation fees.
If you’re a network VAR who’s not familiar with traditional telephony manufacturers, consider yourself lucky!
FortiVoice systems have standard RJ-11 connectors, so for our systems, in the bulk of the office spaces you encounter that have standard wiring, you’ll just plug everything in and you’re good. If you’re using VoIP or IP phones, all you need is some basic familiarity with IP networks, and with basic LAN best practices, which we’ll tell you more about later. Configuration is a snap, too. FortiVoice was designed to be configured by someone with no telephony experience — which is pretty much every small business owner. Our Windows-based configuration software comes with the system and is easy to use and contains no industry jargon. You just load it up and attach it to the system, either directly or through the LAN, and then do the initial configuration. The system doesn’t have to remain attached to a computer to work, by the way.
Again, for your customers who can’t afford a technician visit every time they do a move, add or change, they can do it themselves. Or you can do it remotely. It’s a great pitch for the many businesses that are too small to have in-house IT people, and it ensures that you don’t need to deploy your senior techs for customers who need changes.
Top selling points:
modular growth
FortiVoice also grows with your customers.
Top selling points:
hybrid VoIP/traditional
And it works the same way no matter how your customer wants to connect. VoIP? Traditional PSTN lines? T1 PRI connections? Well, that’s up to them. FortiVoice is a true hybrid phone system.
Your customers can integrate teleworkers or seamlessly connect multiple locations directly over the internet, or they can connect to the increasingly proliferating world of VoIP services.
Some of our customers don’t use VoIP at all; they’re completely content to run on the traditional public
switched telephone network (PSTN), which for them means increased reliability, simplicity and lower costs. That’s fine with us. We give them the power to choose. You’ll find many examples in the field of businesses that are perfectly served by the good ol’ PSTN.
Even among those that do want VoIP, in our experience, very few small business buyers want to abandon their traditional phones or lines and switch completely to VoIP. More commonly, they’re wondering if they can incorporate some VoIP in order to save money or to increase their communication abilities.
FortiVoice delivers the best of both worlds. And by being both things, it means you can sell systems to both kinds
of customers. You can even start customers off with traditional systems and add VoIP later when the customer wants it. FortiVoice makes the transition to VoIP easy. Plus, you can reap extra recurring revenues by selling FortiCall VoIP services to your customers. Your customers get a one-stop solution, you get a recurring source of revenue. Everybody wins.
Top selling points:
phone freedom
FortiVoice is also a hybrid system on the extension side. It works with analog or IP phones. You can mix and match analog and IP phones as your customer’s needs dictate. You’re not even limited to our phones. The system works best with our proprietary FortiFone telephones, but FortiVoice systems also work with any standard analog phone and selected SIP-based IP phones. That gives you and your customer the flexibility to outfit their offices with whatever phone makes the most sense.
Why FortiVoice?
This section goes a little further into the nuts and bolts of what FortiVoice does. I’m going to start with the small business systems first. The larger systems’ features work in much the same way, with just a few differences that I’ll note along the way.
The same features
Every FortiVoice SMB system, no matter what size, has the same set of powerful features. This is a FortiVoice FVC-100, but the same features apply to the FVC-40S, 40, 70 and the 100T. Whether you take our smallest 2-line system or a
have multiple unit systems in multiple sites, they all deliver the same great basic feature set to the users.
Auto attendants
One of the FortiVoice system’s most powerful features is the auto attendant.
Of course, everybody on earth is used to dealing with auto attendants, and for telephony guys, it’s not very exciting. But for your small business customers, the auto attendant really represents what FortiVoice is all about. It gives them the power to sound more professional and run their offices more efficiently. It saves the time, money and frustration of answering and directing calls. Some of our customers are simply delighted that they don’t have to pay somebody to answer the phone all day.
The auto attendant answers the phone with a message recorded by you or by your customer, either directly from an extension, or uploaded from a file on a PC. You can also have them professionally recorded if you like, which gives a really slick image to your customer.
When the auto attendant answers calls, callers can perform several options. You can configure the system to allow any combination of these.
They can dial any local extension number.
These are, most commonly, internal extensions, but they might also be external IP extensions at, say, a teleworker’s home office. More about that later.
They can dial any remote extension.
Or they can access the dial-by-name directory to reach an extension.
This is another standard feature of all FortiVoice systems. Here, of course, the auto attendant invites them to dial the letters of the name of whoever they’re looking for.
They can enter the first one, two or three letters of the user’s name, and you specify in the management software whether the system searches first names, last names or both.
If a matching entry is found, the system will play the user’s name and extension number. The caller can then dial 1 to connect to the user’s extension. If there are multiple matches, the caller can dial 2 to hear the next matching name and extension number.
They can also dial ring groups.
This is another great feature. Ring groups allow you to configure any group of local extensions to ring in unison. So you can configure groups like, “press 1 for sales, press 2 for support,” and so on. And then all of the phones in your sales department ring simultaneously. You can even give the different ring group calls distinct sounds, so the guy sitting at his sales desk knows if the call that’s ringing his phone is in from the general sales ring group or a direct call to his extension.
They can leave a voicemail message directly in any
They can jump to another auto attendant.
There are 20 auto attendants on our SMB systems, and 100 on the 200-series systems, so you can build deep and powerful setups for your customers. You can use different greetings on each incoming line, allowing sophisticated multi-tenant setups. Or you can make it multilingual, where users choose to go to the auto attendant that speaks the language of their choice. Or different departments can have their own auto attendants with their own options.
Voicemail
FortiVoice also comes with its own voicemail. Voicemail is another feature that sounds kind of ho-hum if you’re in the telephony industry. It’s not like this is bleeding-edge technology. But again, it’s one of the things that makes FortiVoice great for small business. Your customers can cut out costs for voicemail services. Not just from their landlines, but from their cell phones too, if they’re using them as remote extensions. It’s a small cost reduction, but multiplied over all employees and every month, it adds up fast.
Each FortiVoice SMB unit has one voice mailbox per local extension, plus…
one for each remote extension…
and 10 general-use mailboxes. So in addition to individuals having voice mailboxes, you can have one for general inquiries, or one for the sales department or whatever. Or you can set up temporary voice mailboxes for time-limited promotions or specific situations.
And, of course, you can retrieve your messages remotely, from any telephone, inside or out of the office. And you can forward a voicemail to other voice mailboxes. You can also set an option to play announcements without allowing callers to leave messages.
And the system stamps each message with the date and time received, which is pretty standard.
You can also set up voicemail to e-mail, so that FortiVoice notifies the recipient by e-mail that a new message is in. You can either just leave it as a notification, or you can include the voicemail as an audio file. Our customers love voicemail to e-mail, because it makes managing messages so much easier.
Not only do you get to skip the whole rigmarole of dialing in to your telephone and touch-tone dialing your way through your messages, but you can easily retrieve them when you’re on the road with your laptop or on your Blackberry or iPhone. It keeps all of your messages, whether phone or e-mail, in your one mailbox. You can see at a glance who your voicemails came from, so you can listen to them in order of importance, rather than chronologically. Plus, they’re easier to fast forward and rewind, easier to store in useful, accessible ways, and
easier to forward to colleagues. Once you start getting your voicemails in your e-mail, you’ll never want to go back to the old way.
As you can see in the example here, you can also see when the message came in and how long it is, and you can save or delete the message at the mailbox. And note that even if you delete the message from your voice mailbox, you still have the audio file in your e-mail, so you can keep literally all of your e-mail forever without ever hitting your FortiVoice voicemail memory limit.
Connect Anywhere extensions
This is one of the most powerful FortiVoice features. Remote extensions and, on the SMB systems, external IP extensions give you the ability to extend the phone system beyond your customer’s walls so that they can stay connected no matter where they are. They can respond to customers faster, collaborate better and stay in touch anywhere.
Any phone, anywhere can be integrated with the FortiVoice system as a Connect Anywhere extension — cell phones, home phones and phones in other cities, or even other countries.
Connect Anywhere extensions are ideal for mobile and teleworkers. Customers, partners and suppliers can reach them by dialing the main office number, whether they’re teleworking, on the road or in the office. This is great, because nobody has to give out anything but the main office number to be in touch.
Just like local extensions, you can configure Connect Anywhere extensions to your customer’s call cascades for sophisticated call routing options. We’ll cover this in more detail in just a minute. You can have your calls ring first at your desk, then your cell phone, then your home phone. For incoming callers, the experience is seamless; you can take their call on the golf course without them knowing you’re out of the office.
There are two kinds of Connect Anywhere extensions: remote extensions and external IP extensions.
Second, external IP extensions. These are available on the SMB systems only. You just connect an IP phone to the Internet anywhere and it becomes an extension of the system. Down the street or around the world, it will work exactly like a local IP extension. That means it can be part of ring groups or cascades, and it can receive intercom calls. It’s the ideal solution for teleworkers or business owners who want to keep a business phone at home. You require broadband internet at both locations. Each external IP extension takes up an IP extension resource, so the number you can have per system depends on the size of the system and how many internal IP extensions you’re running.
Call cascade
But call cascade can do more than that. You can forward the call to other local or remote extensions, or to ring groups or to an announcement or auto attendant. So if you’re not available, the call can go to your partner, for example. You can see this is where you set it up in the FortiVoice software for the SMB systems. It’s a little different in the 200-series systems, but the principles are the same.
Call forwarding and screening
Anyone in the office can forward calls to any local or remote extension, or even another phone number out of the office.
On the small business systems, remote extensions can also screen calls, even at phones that don’t have caller ID or with calls that have the caller ID blocked. Here’s how it works:
First, there’s an “accept/reject” setting. When you answer a forwarded call, you hear a prompt saying: “You have a forwarded call.”, and you choose whether to take it or reject it to your call cascade.
Second, there’s a “play caller’s name first” setting, in which the system prompts callers to record their name at the sound of the tone before putting them on hold. When you answer the forwarded call, FortiVoice says “This is call forward, you have a call from...” and plays the recording. In both cases, you accept the call by pressing the # key or reject it with the * key. If you reject the call, it gets routed according to options you’ve specified, so it can go to voicemail, hang up, go to another local or remote extension or to a ring group or auto attendant.
Call hold/transfer/park
Of course, FortiVoice has the basics, including hold, transfer and parking calls. You can hold calls even at phones that don’t have hold buttons, just by pushing flash.
You can transfer calls to any local or remote extension, ring group or directly to any voice mailbox. You can announce the transfer first and return to the call if the person you’re transferring it to can’t take the call, or you can do a blind transfer.
Parked calls can be retrieved from any extension. Calls on hold can only be picked up at the extension they’ve been held at. But if you have to direct a call to someone who’s not near the phone, you can just park the call and then page the recipient, who can then pick the call up from any local extension. This is especially useful in big facilities like warehouses or manufacturing plants, where workers are frequently not at their desks, but somewhere else in the building. Each FortiVoice system has 10 park “orbits”, so you park a call by pressing *510 or the park button on the phone, and the system tells you which orbit it’s in, 500 to 509. You page your call recipient, saying, “Charlie, call for you on 502,” and Charlie can pick it up from any phone by dialing **502 or unpark 502, depending on what kind of phone he picks it up at.
Call pickup
In addition to parking calls, FortiVoice also allows users to pick up ringing calls from other extensions. You just dial *7 and the number of the ringing extension to grab a specific call, or *9 to pick up any ringing call.
Intercom
And, of course, FortiVoice allows extensions to make intercom calls, so they can call one another, without using any line resources, and they can call remote extensions and external IP extensions, which would use a line or a VoIP trunk. And it works just like you’d expect; you pick up the phone and dial the extension.
PA, set and group paging
Hybrid VoIP/traditional
FortiVoice lets your customer connect how they want to, via VoIP or the traditional telephone network, or both. Three of the models, the FVC-40, 70 and 100, have capacity for VoIP and PSTN connectivity. The FVC-40S is a VoIP-only system.
FortiVoice VoIP is based on SIP, the industry standard, so it’s made for interoperability with industry standard devices and services.
FortiVoice works with VoIP in three ways.
FortiVoice and VoIP
First, and probably the most common, is it allows
connection to VoIP services. Our own VoIP service is called FortiCall, and it’s tailor-made to work with the systems. You get a recurring revenue stream if you sell this with the system. We’ll get into detail on that later.
The second way is branch-to-branch networking. Two FortiVoice systems in two locations can be connected directly over the internet. Each office on a FortiVoice VoIP network can dial directly to any other office, eliminating inter-office calling charges. You can even take calls at one office and transfer them to another branch to be answered. And it doesn’t matter if the offices are in the same city or in a different country, you pay no phone charges at all.
And then there are external IP extensions. That’s an IP phone connected from outside the office — works just the same as though it were inside!
Multiple languages
Having employees, partners and customers who speak different languages can get complicated. But FortiVoice SMB systems make it easier with multilingual capabilities that help your customers communicate all over North America. The system prompts in the SMB systems are available in Spanish, French and English, and you can set the language you want for different auto attendants. So if you have both Spanish and English customers, they can select the language they want.
So while FortiVoice says, “one moment, please” to your English customer, it can also say, “Uno momento, por favor” to your Spanish customer.
So customers and employees get to choose their language. But what about the person configuring the system? FortiVoice software for the SMB systems also speaks Spanish, French and English, and you can switch from one to another any time you need to. And that means you can sell the system to anyone who speaks any of those languages.
Call queue
Call queue is an excellent tool for great customer service that’s available on the FVC-40S, 40, 70 and 100. It gives callers options to get them out of hold, it lets you answer multiple calls in the order they were received and build sophisticated call groups for speedy customer responses.
Nobody likes to be put on hold, so FortiVoice call queue lets you give callers the choice of staying on hold or getting out. When they call an extension that’s busy, callers get prompted to leave a voicemail, back up to the previous auto attendant or continue to wait on the line.
If the caller chooses to wait, the person who’s being called gets prompted at the extension with a beep. If multiple callers are waiting, they can answer them in the order they arrived, or cycle through them to decide which call to take first.
By combining FortiVoice call queue capabilities with ring groups, you can build sophisticated call groups for better customer service. Like uniform call distribution, you can configure call-centre style departments for your customers.
For sales, technical support or other departments with heavy call traffic, call queue ensures that your calls get answered in the order they were received and that callers aren’t trapped on hold.
Mode scheduling
With mode scheduling, FortiVoice can automatically treat calls differently after hours and on holidays so that your customers’ callers get handled professionally no matter when they come in.
You can schedule different auto attendants to answer the phone differently after work hours or on weekends, giving emergency contact options if you like, letting callers leave messages if nobody is around to take a call or simply telling them when you’ll be open next. You can even set FortiVoice to close for lunch.
Pick from a standard calendar of official holidays or input your customer’s special closing days.
Plus, FortiVoice is flexible. In addition to scheduled mode changes, your customers can manually change modes any time they want, onsite or remotely from any telephone. The 200-series systems have even more modes, so you can make a different mode for every day of the week if you want to.
User privileges and PINs
Blocking and routing
The system can also automatically place specific types of calls on specific lines.
This is good for clients who have a phone line or lines with a particularly good long-distance rate, or if you want to ensure that inter-branch calls use your VoIP connection rather than your traditional lines.
Call back/Call bridge
Call back and call bridge are a nifty pair of small business features that you can use to save your small business cus-tomers money when they’re on the road or if they’re heavy cell phone users. This is on the FVC-40S, 40, 70 and 100. Call bridge allows you to seize a line from your FortiVoice system when you’re called in from another phone anywhere.
And here’s how call bridge can help heavy cell phone users. First, for cell plans that include a “My Five” or “Five Favorites”, you just have your customer include her own FortiVoice system number within the five free calling numbers. Then, when she wants to call virtually any number from her cell phone, she just calls FortiVoice first, dials a code to grab an outside line, and that’s that. Or, if your customer doesn’t have a “My Five” plan, but gets unlimited free inbound calls, he can engage call back to call his cell phone. When FortiVoice calls back, he can seize a line and off he goes. No-charge cell use, as much as he wants.
not from the hotel to wherever, with the hotel premium. It’s not on the hotel bill at all, and you can place as many calls as you want and check your voicemail while you’re at it.
For customers who have hardcore road warriors, the call back and call bridge features alone can make a major difference to overall communication costs.
Music on hold
Customers love this one for the polished, professional image it provides. They can just plug FortiVoice into any standard audio source, like a CD player or the radio and voila! Music on hold. Or they can upload music files and have music on hold without an external device.
Lots of FortiVoice customers take the music on hold feature one step further by recording promotional messages to inform waiting customers of new products or services.
Ring Groups
Ring groups were covered a little earlier, but here are just a couple of things about FortiVoice ring groups that you’ll find handy.
Call detail record logging
Call detail record logging tracks the calls that go through your system with sophisticated information, including call length, line usage, wait times and all the transfers or holds that happen to a call.
If you have customers who bill their clients for calls, like lawyers do, for instance, FortiVoice call detail record logging allows your customer to assign account codes to calls and then track precisely how much time was spent on the phone with them. Even if they’re not billing clients for time, call detail record logging can help improve efficiency by allowing them to analyze the amount of time they spend on the phone with their customers, suppliers and partners.
Call detail record logging tells you the date, time and duration of a call, whether calls were inbound or outbound and caller ID name and number (if available). It also
indicates such events as whether a call was answered by the auto attendant, transferred to an extension, queued at an extension, transferred to voicemail or blocked. It’s a complete history of everything that happened to every call. You can store the information as a file or have it displayed live on your computer as it happens. Your call data can also easily be imported into an Excel spreadsheet so you can group, sort and tally critical business information like total
line usage for a day, number of inbound calls, average call wait times, average call times and number of calls per line. It’s a wealth of information that can help clients improve customer service and increase efficiency.
For customers who need very detailed reporting, you’ll likely want to recommend our call reporting software. It takes the CDR information and turns it into very powerful, sophisticated reports that are more accessible to the average user.
Conference calls
FortiVoice SMB systems handle conferencing in two ways. For quickie ad-hoc conferences with three parties, you just put the first party on hold, call the second party and press the Join softkey. Voila! Instant conference. You can set up conference calling between three local extensions, two local extensions and one outside caller, or two outside callers and one local extension.
In that case, users will just dial 80 after putting the first outside party on hold, in order to invoke the 3-way calling service. Doing that requires the phone company service, of course. For groups larger than three, FortiVoice has a conference bridge. Works just like you’d imagine it to; everybody calls the conference bridge number and then the specific conference room number the moderator assigns. Up to 8 people can join a conference room.
Automatic fax detection
Automatic fax detection is another money-saver for small business customers. For all of those businesses who have a dedicated fax line, they can plug in to the FortiVoice system, which automatically detects CNG tones and sends those to the fax machine.
When there are no faxes, which for most businesses is most of the time, the line can be used for regular phone traffic.
Hunt group balancing
Hunt group balancing allows you to set options with line hunt groups to ensure that your customer’s phone lines are operating in the most efficient way possible for outgoing calls. This is on the systems that use PSTN lines, so the FVC-40, 70 and 100 only. So if you set up a hunt group with, for example, four lines, you can set the system to start with the line after the last hunted line in the hunt group. This way telephone lines are used more evenly for outbound calls.
For example, let’s say a hunt group has lines 1, 2, 3 and 4. The last call with the hunt group used line 2. The system will first check line 3 for availability.
Remote management
FortiVoice configuration can be done over IP, so you or your customers can change the settings anywhere with a computer that’s attached to the internet, as long as the target system is on a LAN configured for remote management.
This allows you to troubleshoot customer concerns or handle changes without leaving your desk, which is a lot easier and cheaper than rolling out a truck. Lots of our resellers do management or upgrades remotely.
System speed dials
Caller ID based routing
Caller ID based routing allows you to set up call handling based on the caller ID information of an incoming call. For example, if the call is from an important client, it can be routed directly to the president’s extension.
You can define up to 200 caller ID entries to be handled up to ten different ways. You have the exact same options for handling these calls as you do for configuring your telephone lines. So they can go to extensions or groups or whatever.
Line appearance
Lots of small businesses need a system that provides line appearance, especially if they want to have calls answered by a live person who would then transfer calls to extensions, and therefore needs to see who’s on the phone and who’s not. Line appearance is common in key systems, which are fundamentally inferior to full PBX systems like FortiVoice. But although FortiVoice is not a key system, the SMB systems provide line appearance in a couple of different ways.
Distinctive ring
Distinctive ring is a telephone company service that provides multiple phone numbers on one telephone line. Each one of the phone numbers rings the phone with a different ring pattern. The ring patterns have one, two, or three rings in each burst, so just by listening, you know which number was dialed.
FortiVoice can detect distinctive rings on each of its lines, and use them to route faxes to a fax machine and voice calls to an auto attendant. Or it can separate home and office calls for customers who have a business operating out of their house. Or a customer can run two different businesses on one line with one FortiVoice system and different auto attendants. Or you can use one number to invoke a FortiVoice call back.
Depending on your service provider, distinctive ring is also referred to as Ident-A-Ring, Ident-A-Call, Ring Master, Teen Service, Double Number, Personal Ringing, Ring Plus, Smart Ring Service, Special Ring, Customized Ringing, Call Sign, My Ring, Duet — Phone and Fax Multiple Number, or Smart Ring.
Hotline
In the portal, they can set their caller ID. They can set their voicemail options, including how long the phone rings before going to voicemail and where the system sends e-mails. And just like the small business systems, you can have an e-mail notification of a voicemail message, or you can include the actual message itself. They can set up the follow me settings, speed dials, and they can manage their outgoing message from there.
Each user can also set up a personal blacklist, preventing unwanted callers from reaching their extension.
Lastly, the 200-series also has an extra layer of security, which enterprise customers appreciate, by using SIP over TLS where supported. This adds another level of encryption to protect packets of voice information while they’re in transit.
200-series features
The 200-series systems have most of the same features, with just a few extras that I want to highlight here. First, call recording. This does just what it says, allowing users to record calls.
Next, the web interface. Unlike the SMB systems, the configuration for the 200-series is entirely web-based. So you can configure it on any machine anywhere you want. What’s really interesting is the web-based user portal. This allows the users on the system to configure some of their own settings.
Phones
This module delves into the rest of the FortiVoice product line-up, which includes phones, additional productivity software, FortiCare and FortiCall VoIP services, all of which you will be selling to your customers.
This is not a technical analysis, but rather an overview to familiarize you with the products and their features so that you know what each product can do. We’ll dig in to the technical side of installation and configuration in an upcoming chapter.
Now, about phones: the system works best with our FortiFone phones, but you can also use FortiVoice with any standard analog phones on the SMB systems and selected IP phones, so if your customer has some existing phones or special phone needs, you can take care of them. It’s a flexible hybrid system that offers you a lot of freedom in the way you outfit your customers.
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When you’re selling the phones, it’s all going to boil down to what your customer needs, and what they’re equipped for. Two of the main drivers you’ll run into with the SMB systems are line appearance and capacity. If your customers require line appearance on their phone, and many of our customers tell us that they do, then you’re going to sell IP phones.
If you want to have offsite workers with full extension capabilities, you’ll also need to do that with IP phones. Plus, most FortiVoice SMB system can use 4 or 8 analog phones, depending on how many analog extension ports it has. But the majority of the extension capacity is for IP phones.
The FVC-40S and 200D don’t have any analog ports, so you can’t use analog phones with them. The 200D-T has one analog port.
So in many cases, you’ll want to sell IP phones. However, IP phones are not without their drawbacks. For one thing, IP phones require a LAN, and they require some knowledge on your part about networks and networking best practices to ensure their smooth deployment.
Also, IP phones won’t work without power, but analog phones can. In the event of a power outage with an FVC-40, 70 or 100 system, all calls get routed over line 1 to jack E4. If you have an analog phone connected to jack E4, it will continue to function. No other extensions will function, whether they are analog or IP phones, but you can still answer incoming calls. Even if you’re using IP phones for an SMB customer’s system, you may want to keep an analog phone connected to jack E4. Once the power comes back, the system will resume normal function.
FON-260i IP phone
Now let’s look at each of the phones, starting with our entry-level IP phone — the FON-260i.
This is a simple, inexpensive stripped-down IP phone for users who don’t need all the bells and whistles. It has no blinking line appearance lights, no complications. You just dial it and talk. Great for courtesy phones in reception areas or for staff with low feature requirements.
It’s got 4 programmable feature keys and 8 dedicated feature keys, and a half-duplex speakerphone. You should be aware that this is the only IP desk phone in the lineup that doesn’t offer line appearance, though, so if a user requires that, you need to move them to one of the other phones, like the FON-360i.
FON-360i IP phone
The FON-360i is a terrific telephone, and one of our most popular. This one has 6 programmable appearance or feature keys, and you decide what to configure these for. These keys are paired with big, multi-colored LED lights, so it’s extremely clear what state the phone is in.
It’s got 3 softkeys and 11 one-touch feature keys. It’s got a reversible stand, so you can place it at two different angles, depending on user preference, and has POE and 2 Ethernet ports, and a delayed ring option that allows users to pick it up when it’s flashing, before it starts to ring.
FON-460i IP phone
The next phone in our line is the middle brother of the series. This is the FON-460i.
This phone is a little bigger, with 10 of the same style of easy-to-see, easy-to-use appearance or feature keys. And this phone, like its even bigger brother, the FON-560i, can be expanded with up to 2 FF-50E expansion units, that bring it up to 34 appearance keys.
And, like the FON-360i, this phone has dedicated feature keys, softkeys, an adjustable stand, POE, 2 ethernet ports and the printable dialpad.
Both the FON-460i and FON-560i have gigabit ethernet ports.
FON-560i IP phone
Next up is our real powerhouse phone, the big brother of the group, the FON-560i. This phone has some terrific features that allow it to do some things that our other telephones just can’t do.
The base phone itself has 22 appearance or feature keys, which you can expand to a whopping 46 if you add 2 of the FF-50E expansion units. Obviously, this is the phone that your customers are going to want on their receptionists’ desks. And as with the other phones, these feature big, bright, multi-colored LED lights, so it delivers a really optimum usability. It’s very obvious when a line or extension changes states.
On top of that, it’s got 11 feature keys, the delayed ring option, 2-digit speed dials and the same printable dialpads as the other phones. And you can imagine how handy that’s going to come in with a phone that has 46 appearances!
The FON-560i also has an optional Bluetooth® module. The
phone can operate with a Bluetooth headset. This is really a premium IP phone with a whole lot of power, and it’s got excellent audio quality.
Just one thing about these three phones; the line
FF-50E and FF-65B
Last, there are a couple of accessories for the phones. I mentioned the FF-50E just now, and here it is. This is the device that attaches to the FON-460i and FON-560i, adding 12 programmable LED buttons. You can use two per phone. The FF-65B is a Bluetooth module that plugs into
the side of the FON-460i or 560i and lets you use a
Bluetooth headset.
FON-600 analog phone
The FON-600 is our analog phone. As you can see, it’s got a big adjustable display that a lot of customers like. This one has full headset support, with both RJ22 and 2.5mm headset jacks and a dedicated headset button. It’s got multiple rings and ring once. The FON-600 also has a combined power and phone cord.
FortiCall
services. FortiCall is our proprietary VoIP service, which gives your customers the benefit of one-stop shopping and gives you a source of recurring revenue. Every business has phone service of some kind, and they’re paying someone for it, so why not you?
You receive 10 percent of the billings, outside of
emergency services fees. That means you get commission on each initial sale, but also on every monthly bill for as long as the customer uses the service. They add another line? Your revenue increases. A toll-free number? Your revenue increases.
FortiCall standard lines give your customers unlimited calling in the continental US (excluding Alaska) and Canada
(excluding NWT) at $24.95 per line. There’s a two-line minimum purchase and each line comes with one free telephone number. Extra phone numbers are only a dollar a month, so it’s easy for your customers to have as many DID numbers as they need, or to set up specific numbers for specific uses or to help track promotions or do whatever they want to do. The phone numbers can be in any of the area codes covered by the service, so a business in New York can have a “local” phone number in LA, for example. Toll-free numbers are also available, as is international calling.
Your FortiCall commissions are tied to your FortiPartner incentive card. Just enter (or have your customers enter) your reseller code when signing up for the service. If you don’t have your FortiPartner incentive card yet, you need to get one. Your code is in the top left corner of your dashboard at the ACB promotions website.
Here’s how you sign up. Visit www.forticall.com and click
Sign Up. You or your customer can sign up. You’ll need the
system ID and MAC address of the relevant system, and the credit card information of your customer. And this is where you or your customer must enter your 5-digit reseller code for you to get compensated.
You’ll see here that there’s also a free trial available, so if you’ve got a customer who’s sitting on the fence or has any doubts about the quality of VoIP service versus the traditional telephone network, they can try free outbound calling for 300 minutes or 30 days, whichever comes first.
Productivity applications
FortiVoice Console
First up is the FortiVoice Console. This is a software version of an attendant console phone, but because it’s software, and because it can reside on every workstation in your customer’s office, it does much more than your standard attendant console phone.
One FortiVoice Console license covers all of the employees in the office. FortiVoice Console allows everybody in the office to see their calls and control their calls right from their computer. They can see who’s calling, drag and drop calls and manage their call queues, and they can see the status of everyone in the office they want to see.
This is what it looks like.
As you can see, the interface allows you to see lines, your active calls, and icon-based views of all of the users you care about in the office.
Each user gets to choose what they want to see and not see, so the FortiVoice Console is a very flexible tool. Receptionists can see who’s available to take calls and who’s busy or on do not disturb. Managers can see at a glance anytime who’s working the phones and who isn’t. And everyone else can collaborate better by seeing the status of coworkers and communicating through the built-in chat feature.
Calls
What happens when you get a call? You get a little pop-up window that tells you who’s calling. This works just like Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail notification, down in the lower right corner of your screen.
When you bring the application to the foreground, The
My Calls window shows you the calls that you get or make
Queues
If you have more than one call queued at your extension, you can see them both, which delivers the obvious benefit of allowing you to answer calls in order of importance, rather than the order they arrived.
Lines
You also see the change in the status to the line that the call comes in on, when it changes from green to red.
Display
Don’t want to see the lines? No problem. You can minimize that window with a click if the line view isn’t important.
Call control
Status
The icons show you the status of the people in your group. Because each user selects what this window shows, it’s easy to make sure it’s relevant. Receptionists will want to see everybody in the company, and so might employees in very small companies. In bigger companies, employees will more commonly limit the display to those coworkers with whom they typically collaborate.
You can see the different possible states in the icons here. The little green guy? He’s on hook, ready to take a call.
Red guy with the little phone means that person is on the phone. Red blinking guy means that phone is ringing.
Some of our resellers have actually sold the FortiVoice Console on this feature alone, to customers who forbid standard chat applications on their corporate networks, but want to have the improved employee collaboration that a dedicated chat application can deliver.
Managers of groups that are phone-intensive can also mandate that their users sign in for chat when they’re available to take calls so that the icon window indicates, at a glance, what the phone coverage is; who’s at their desk ready to take calls and who’s not.
Icons
You’ll also see a couple of other icons; the grey hand icon showing when an extension is on ‘do not disturb’. And you can also see here that if you hover on an
icon that’s on the phone, you can see who that user is connected to, and how long the call has been in progress.
Chat
There’s a grey icon that indicates an unregistered IP extension, …
and then there’s these little remote extension guys, …
and ring group guys.
So that’s the fundamentals of the program. Again, each user gets to design what his or her console shows in terms of lines and extensions. That’s all under the View menu in the Client preferences section. They can also custom-ize how it notifies them of calls and chats, and even what color it appears as.
Call Reporting
Our other optional software application is a little more specialized. Meet Call Reporting, the application that tracks and reports data about your SMB system usage. As with the FortiVoice Console, this application works with the FVC-40S, 40, 70 and 100, but is not for use with the 200-series systems. Call Reporting delivers a wealth of data to the kinds of customers who need to monitor call activity in detailed reports. It’s especially useful to customers who run phone-intensive sales or support organizations and want to track and review extension or department usage, and for customers like lawyers, accountants and other consultants who bill for advice delivered over the phone. Call Reporting works by collecting all of the data generated by the FortiVoice system call detail record logging into a database from which it generates a multitude of reports. Call Reporting can give your customers all the details they need about who is making and taking calls, how long they last, exactly how much they cost and more.
All events on your FortiVoice system — including transfers, calls on hold, and time spent in a queue, are tracked and reportable through the easy-to-use FortiVoice Call Reporting interface.
Reports
You can also generate reports on all incoming calls — who answered each call, the caller ID the call came from, duration of the call, incoming ring times, unanswered calls, and even calls to your advertised directory numbers. You can run reports whenever you need them, over any time frame you like; the last hour, day, week, month or year. And you can run them in real time if you need to actively monitor the performance of, say, a sales team. Or you can schedule reports to be e-mailed automatically when you want them.
FortiCare
One thing you’ll want to add to every FortiVoice sale is FortiCare. It’s the service package that will allow your customers to access technical support beyond your first line service, and will allow you to use our support team when working on a particular unit that has problems. It also allows you to get an advanced hardware replacement if a unit is defective in the field, and it gives you or your customer access to software updates for the system. FortiCare coverage lasts for one year and costs significantly less than our least expensive telephone. You can buy up to five years of FortiCare coverage at a time.
It’s an easy upsell and ensures that your customer keeps their system up and running and up-to-date. We also offer the systems bundled with the first year of FortiCare. We find that customers prefer that because it simplifies the pitch. But it’s up to you. You can sell the systems separately from the FortiCare if that’s what you want to do.
If they don’t want to buy FortiCare with their system, they’ve still got a one-year limited hardware warranty, 90 days of technical support and 90 days access to software updates.
Reseller Training
Part Four: Qualifying the Customer,
Qualifying the customer,
qualifying the site
We’ve learned through experience that if you give the customer the wrong system, they will get very unhappy very fast, and they’ll complain and give you headaches, and possibly even return the equipment so that you make no money.
So that’s what this part of the program is about: avoiding headaches, avoiding complaints and ensuring that your word of mouth stays strongly positive.
How do you do it? You sell them the right stuff at the start. We’ll go through the list of things that you should consider when you start a discussion with a customer.
How many lines?
How many lines does your new customer need? Sounds simple, right?
Well, sure, for telephony professionals, this is no big deal. For customers who have never had a phone system, even simple questions like this can pose quite a challenge. If you’re replacing a system, the customer ought to know how many lines they have. They’re paying for them, so they tend to be a little more aware.
If your customer is just getting started, though, you might have to explain the whole concept of the number of lines being the maximum number of concurrent calls. And in a few minutes we’ll look at the whole issue of whether the lines are going to be VoIP or traditional PSTN lines. But to start, you need to determine number of lines.
Make sure you check things like whether or not they need a dedicated fax line, or a line that can handle credit card transactions. And does the president or owner need to have a dedicated line or a direct phone number?
Remember to ask about the customer’s growth plans. It’s usually cheaper in the long run for the customer to buy a system with extra line capacity if she expects the company to grow beyond its initial line usage. But not every
If your customer isn’t sure, it’s no big deal. And it’s no big deal if the customer underestimates their growth, because FortiVoice is a modular system that’s easy to add to when they need it, right up to 400 users per location in the small and medium business systems. But like I say, it’s usually cheaper to buy a little extra capacity up front.
How many extensions?
Here’s another simple one. You just get a head count of who needs phones. And find out whether they need any common area phones, like lunch rooms, meeting rooms for conference calls, or the courtesy area at the front desk.
Is the customer replacing an
existing system?
If they are replacing an existing system, in some ways all of the previous things get easier, because those customers are more likely to understand the concept of a phone system. As I said, they’ll probably know how many phone lines they have, for instance, and they’ll certainly know how many extensions they’ve got.
But if you’re replacing a system, it’s also important to give them the functionality they’re used to, and believe me, we’ve learned this the hard way. If they have line appearance, for instance, you better give them line appearance.
What it boils down to is: do not try to teach people a new way of using the phone.
What’s their wiring like?
The existing wiring can be a factor in the overall cost of the installation, so that’ll drive some customer decisions. You’ll probably have to visit their facility to figure this one out, since most customers really have no idea what kind of wir-ing they’ve got. If the customer’s space is already wired for analog phones, it’s cheap and easy to recommend analog phones.
Standard wiring
Ideally, you’ll have standard star wiring, with a central demarcation point where the phone lines come into the office, and a star topology of CAT3 wiring that goes from
there to each office. Once in a while you’ll run into offices that are wired in a series, which looks more like the figure on the right here, where a line goes to one office, and then branches off to the next and the next and so on. If that’s the case, you’ll have to rewire if they want analog phones. Then there’s the question of their network. If they’ve got CAT5 wiring with network drops at each workstation, you might be able to use IP phones without doing any extra wiring. That’ll depend on their data traffic. Low data traffic offices can run the phones and the computers on the same network. More about that in a minute.
What’s their call volume like?
Ask your customer if he’s got any report of monthly call volumes, or at least any idea of how much traffic they get. You want to try to determine whether their current setup is limiting, or, conversely, if they’re oversubscribing for services.
Ask about the percentages of inbound versus outbound calls. Ask about local versus long-distance calls.
Can you use the fax line for outbound calls? Lots of our customers dump the dedicated fax line in favor of sharing that line for outbound calls.
It’s wise to have a discussion about line access restrictions. Customers typically prefer to keep most of the lines available for incoming callers, but most are willing to accept limited outbound access during busy traffic times if it saves some money on lines.
After you’ve made the sale, you can also run call reporting on the first month’s usage to see if you can fine-tune the line use. Are the needs being met? Can you do further line reductions?
VoIP, PSTN, T1 PRI?
Some customers will already have decided that they want a VoIP provider, or that they just want a traditional system. If they already have one or the other, they’ll probably just want to stick with it.
But there are a lot of options here. Many of our customers use VoIP for cheaper outbound calling, while using their PSTN lines primarily for inbound calls. If your client does a lot of long distance, there can be significant savings with VoIP too.
In some cases, depending on the provider, your customer can make multiple calls on a VoIP line as well, adding to the efficiency of the system.
And it’s a lot easier to add lines with FortiCall VoIP service or with most other VoIP providers. Usually you can do it online in ten minutes, whereas if you’re dealing with the phone company, you know how that goes; they have to schedule a rollout to get a new line to a client, and it always takes longer than you want it to.
So there are a few reasons for your customers to consider VoIP. It can be good for you too, if you sell FortiCall VoIP service. You get a source of recurring revenue from that. On the other hand, there are a lot of reasons to recommend the good ol’ PSTN. Mainly, it’s just more reliable. The traditional telephone network, with its “five nines” reliability, beats counting on your internet connection to carry your calls. The network’s down? So is your phone. That’s why some of our customers keep at least one analog line and an analog phone.
Above a certain size of office, around ten lines or so, many customers will want T1 PRI service, since it’s cheaper than phone lines. In that case, your options are the FVC-100T or the 200D-T, which are the only systems in the family that support T1.
T1? E1? PRI? Huh?
T1 is actually short for “Trunk Level 1”. A T1 is a digital connection between a telephony provider and your customer.
An E1 is the same thing, but it’s used by everybody else in the world outside of the US and Canada. Except for Japan, which uses J1. Go figure.
T1 can carry 23 calls, and E1 can carry 30. And, as with VoIP trunks, you can have a bunch of different numbers per channel, allowing your customers to have different dedicated phone numbers for every worker, if you want to. That’s direct inward dialing, or DIDs.
Emergency calling
And just a side note there; FortiVoice FVC-40, 70, 100 and 100T systems even retain some emergency functionality when the power goes out, if you have a PSTN line and an analog phone plugged into extension port E4. You can’t VoIP without electricity. Some of our SMB customers like to keep an analog phone around just for this purpose.
The phones: analog or IP?
Now, what about phones? How do you assess what kind of phones your customer needs?
The majority of phones that you’ll sell will be IP phones, with perhaps an analog phone as a back-up for your small and medium business customers. The 40S and 200D systems don’t support analog phones at all, and the 200D-T only has one analog port. Analog phones don’t support line appearance either, so most small businesses prefer the IP phones.
Phone capacity
To pick an example, let’s say you sold a FortiVoice FVC-40 to a customer. The FVC-40 has a capacity for four analog extensions.
So if you sold the FVC-40 to a customer who wanted to outfit 10 or 12 or 15 or 16 phone users, you’re going to have to use at least some IP phones. Up to four of the phones can be analog, but any over four must be IP phones. And that’s just a limitation of the number of ports to plug phones into. If the customer needs more analog extensions, you’ll have to sell an additional system.
Analog or IP?
Network best practices
If you are installing IP phones, it’s important that you understand a few things about the network in order to ensure that the phones perform the way your customers expect them to.
Basically, in offices with modest network traffic, it’s okay to run the IP phones on the same network as the computers. But for companies that have lots of users who transfer lots of large files or depend on heavy traffic with a central data-base, it’s best to wire the phones on a separate network. No two networks are the same, so there is no one-size-fits-all configuration that will work for everyone. To determine the type of deployment to use, you must know the number of users, type of traffic and available resources.
User number vs. traffic
In some cases you’ll decide based on number of users. In some cases it’ll be type of traffic, as you can see in the chart here.
Here are some examples of companies whose deployments should be based on the number of extensions:
• Dentist offices • Real estate offices • Law firms
• Retail stores
Here are some examples of companies whose deployments should be based on the type of traffic:
• Graphic designers • Engineering firms
Pass-through Network
Deployment
This is what we call the pass-through network deployment. It uses the existing network. This method is quick
and easy, but may slow down the PCs’ connection to network applications while phones are in use, so it’s not recommended for heavy computer users who have a central database, or who send large files.
It’s suitable for companies with computer users who primarily use the network to search the web or send e-mails.
In this deployment, the FortiVoice system and all of the IP phones connect to the existing network switch.
The employees’ PCs connect to their phones, sharing the network drop.
In this case, you have less networking cables and
equipment than the standard deployment, so it’s cheaper for the end user. You’re piggybacking on the existing network infrastructure.
The downside is that your phones will take priority, so network applications will run slower on the PCs.
Standard Network
Deployment
Next up is the standard deployment.
This is more reliable, since each device has its own network drop, eliminating conflicts of shared network connections. By splitting the traffic, it becomes easier to ensure voice traffic is not as affected by what the data users are doing. It’s still not recommended for heavy network users who have a central server, or who work on large files on the network, since the computers and the phones are still sharing a single switch. Using a managed switch would help reduce potential problems.
As you can see, the FortiVoice system again connects to the existing network switch, but in this case, each IP phone gets a separate network drop.
You don’t need additional network equipment, and this deployment is easier to troubleshoot, simpler to manage and makes it easy to move devices.
Separate Voice Network
Deployment
Reseller Training
Part Five: Installing and Configuring
Connections
This module is about installing and configuring the FortiVoice small and medium business systems. We pride ourselves in the ease of installation of our products, so most of you should basically be able to install them with your eyes closed. Even some end-users choose to install it themselves, just using the FortiVoice Start Guide and other documentation provided.
But there are a few things that will help you install the product smarter and faster. These tips will help you install FortiVoice with confidence, knowing your customers will get what they need from the system.
Let’s start with a look at the physical connections on a system. This particular unit is a FortiVoice FVC-70.
First let’s look at extensions and lines. The eight black RJ-11 extension jacks are where you plug your analog phones, if you’re using them. They’re numbered E1 to E8.
FVC-40, 70, 100 and 100T systems come with four or eight analog extension ports, depending upon the system. If we were looking at an FVC-40, you would only see the bottom four jacks here. The FVC-40S has no analog ports at all. All of the ports are two-wire interfaces, so they will only use the inner pair of pins on a standard phone cord. You can use a four-wire phone cord or cable, but the system won’t detect anything on the outer pair of wires.
Now, the same holds true for the CO lines, or line jacks. They’re the grey ones to the right of the extension ports. These are also two-wire connectors, and so we don’t sense anything on the outer pair of wires. This becomes extremely important when connecting the phone lines, as each phone line must have its own phone cord. Some homes or small offices are wired with two lines per wall jack. In this case you would need to split those two lines into two separate phone cords in order to connect them to the FortiVoice system.
To the right of the line ports is the RJ-45 network port, which is used for configuration of the system, VoIP, and communication between FortiVoice systems on the local area network.
The network connection on FortiVoice is a standard 10/100 MB full-duplex port.
The LED lights above the network port are typical lights. They indicate network connection established, transmitting data and receiving data.
The music port is a standard stereo 1/8” audio jack for the connection of a CD player, MP3 player or radio for music on hold. There’s no volume control from the FortiVoice software, so you adjust the volume on the device itself. It supports either a stereo or mono audio cable. You can also upload music files to the FortiVoice in .wav format if you don’t want to attach a device.
Next to that, the PA jack also takes a standard stereo 1/8” audio plug. If you want to test it, an easy way is to plug in a pair of computer speakers.
System resources
That’s it for what you see outside of the box. But inside there are number of system resources that you should be aware of when setting up a FortiVoice SMB system.
Each unit comes with 28 hours of memory. Memory is used for all announcements, auto attendant greetings, music-on-hold files, voicemail greetings and messages.
In a multi-unit setup, auto attendants and music-on-hold files are automatically copied to each unit. It ensures that if one system goes down, all other units can continue functioning.
A number of systems out there are billed as 4-port or 6-port voicemail systems, which means that there can only be four or six callers or users in the voicemail at once. FortiVoice can answer calls, both PSTN and VoIP, on all its lines with an auto attendant or send them to voicemail, and simultaneously allow local extensions to check voicemail.
There are some limitations to recording lengths within the system, but they don’t tend to cause issues. For instance, the maximum recording length for auto attendants and voicemail greetings is five minutes. You will have trouble finding customers who need greetings longer than one minute!
We also limit the voicemail message length. The default is two minutes, but you can increase it by one-minute increments up to eight minutes. This is a system-wide parameter, so it affects all users.
The maximum number of messages that a voice mailbox can have is 100. After that, inbound callers get a message saying that voicemail is currently unavailable for this user and to call again later. With voicemail to e-mail functionality, it’s pretty rare for users to accumulate that many messages in the mailbox.
FortiVoice Management
software
To configure a FortiVoice SMB system, you use the FortiVoice software. And to configure the FortiVoice software, you have to connect your system to a computer that’s running the software. We do this three different ways.
First, the RJ-45 network port. When you plug it into the network with the computer on it, the software on the computer can detect the system through the IP connection. And a FortiVoice system will automatically detect any other FortiVoice system on the local area network.
