The problem arises as you scale up; if you grow from 1 employee to 100 and your customer base grows from 500 to 10,000 it becomes difficult to expand your business telephone system. Setting up such a huge calling desk and maintenance become an expensive affair.

Is there any way to reduce telecom expenses is the question in everybody’s mind. Startups and SMEs who need to scale up fast often find it difficult to cope with the increasing cost of business telecom. And there comes IP telephony or business VoIP, the technology that has changed the corporate communication process entirely.

Over past couple of weeks, business VoIP has undergone serious changes. It’s not just a voice over data network any more; most of the VoIP providers are offering something more than that. Apart from the integration of voice with data network, VoIP providers are offering seamless integration of communication process with many other products and services too. Hence, there is a visible value-addition over traditional telephone system.

Three most important factors for businesses in present time are:

1. Unified Communication
2. Collaboration
3. Integration

Businesses need to collaborate with others; team members need to collaborate to achieve bigger goals. There has to be a way for all the team members to communication seamlessly – no matter where they are located, what are their roles and what tool or device they use. This is what business VoIP can offer. In short it is the one-stop solution for all business communication and collaboration requirements.

However, to achieve this, business VoIP providers in Canada took initiatives to improve the infrastructure. Old PSTN model became outdated and high speed data network took over. Without such a strong base, VoIP technology could never reach the stage where it is today.

And the best part is, this technology will improve further. If you have not plugged-in to business VoIP yet, go for it. Look for business VoIP providers in Canada and know how they can help you. Professional VoIP providers would offer you the right solution within your budget.

You can contact SunTel Technologies as well. We are one of the leading business telecom services providers in Canada.

The post Business VoIP Canada – Let your data network carry your voice appeared first on SunTel Technologies Inc..

Running a business without IT support is something like asking people to set up industry without electricity. IT is the backbone of business operations these days; you can automate, you can keep track easily and you can increase efficiency by digitizing all the operations.

Managed IT Services allow you to get all the benefits without demanding much of your time. You can focus on your core business process while the service provider takes care of the IT part of your business.

Here is a list of benefits that you get by using Managed IT Services offered by a reputed provider.

1] Stay ahead of your time

Technology gets outdated very fast; as an SME it might be difficult for you to invest high on infrastructure. Therefore you will continue using old stuff whereas your competitors might move ahead. By working with a top level Managed IT Service provider you can get rid of this issue; most of the IT service providers invest in infrastructure and upgrades with time. Hence, you get to use latest technology and tools by working with them.

2] Low investment and known monthly expense

If you are to set up the IT department from scratch, you need to make a huge investment. And there might be unexpected incidents that can demand quick action as well. This problem can be avoided by working with a professional Managed IT Service provider in Canada. You know how much you need to pay them every month; and the initial investment is not very high too.

3] Smooth disaster recovery and business continuity

Disaster recovery and business continuity are two major things for any business; people invest a lot to ensure that these two aspects are in place. By working with a professional Managed IT service provider you can ensure seamless business operations during disasters or natural calamities.

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SugarCRM is one such open source CRM software; with SugarCRM you can automate the process flows, work flows and other business processes activities. There are many benefits of using SugarCRM; this is a customer relationship management application that allows you to cut on operational expenses and helps you to improve productivity.

This open source application is based on PHP and MySQL. Hence, you can easily customize it in order to make the platform a perfect fit for your business. You can create your own customized dashboard to get a consolidated view of your business; such dashboards help you understand how your business is performing. You can further customize it to achieve other business management goals.

Here are some of the advantages of using customized SugarCRM application.

1] Share data with specific team members; you can define restriction on information sharing according to user levels.

2] Import existing data stored in different file formats in to your SugarCRM application.

3] Monitor full history of tasks, meetings, calls, chats etc. to get a 360-degree view of the relationship with a customer. Users can attach files, keep notes and save contact details of customers and others in the loop for future reference.

4] Get detailed report of upcoming meetings, events, unattended leads, long pending tasks etc. You can see total number of leads received within a specific date range and how many of them got converted as well.

5] Keep all important and relevant customer information at one place; this can be of immense help for successful cross selling and better customer interaction.

6] By creating a case management module you can track specific customer problems and see how those problems were solved in past.

7] Define advanced and customized reporting to get the specific data that you frequently need to monitor performance.

8] SugarCRM 6 runs across different cloud environments; by using CRM application built on SugarCRM 6 you can get full control over customers’ data.

9] There are various SugarCRM modules available; you can add and customize them to implement a specific functionality.

10] Latest versions of SugarCRM offers built-in social media support. SugarCRM Mobile Plus allows you to access the application from BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone and many other mobile devices.

You can contact us to develop customized SugarCRM application for your business. We offer SugarCRM customization and implementation service in all major cities in Canada.

The post Top 10 Reasons to Consider Open Source SugarCRM appeared first on SunTel Technologies Inc..

Though people think that whatever is there on the internet can be traced and hacked easily; but the fact is, in case of traditional switched telephone circuit tracking a call is much more easy than VoIP call tracing. In traditional telephone systems, the routes of call transferring and the entire functionality are pre-defined. The route might vary from one exchange to another, but it remains same within a single exchange. However, in case of VoIP or hosted PBX, there is no fixed route of signal transmission. There are many servers located all across the globe. The route is defined during runtime; it is not always the shortest route, but the quickest route, some times. The shortest route might have congestion, hence, the packets are routed through the path that is not that much congested and that can deliver a considerable turnaround time.

Professional hosted PBX service providers in Canada, make sure that everything is in place so that their clients can get a secured environment. Moreover, the government of many countries make it must for the VoIP providers to offer a secure network. It is true that the users need to be careful to make sure that the data and voice call records are protected. The hosted PBX service providers and the users have to employ right firewall, LAN settings and VPN settings to make sure that all confidential data are protected at both the ends.

You have to work with professional hosted PBX provider in Canada. A professional service provider will always help you to configure the high-end and protected system. With recent developments in the fields of internet security, creating a safe VoIP account is not difficult any more.

The post Is Hosted PBX Free From Security Threats? appeared first on SunTel Technologies Inc..

The transition is here now; Microsoft had officially announced about the transition and Outlook.com has replaced Hotmail finally. Around February 2013, Microsoft said that Outlook.com was ready to replace Hotmail; at that time they started to move 300 million Hotmail users to Outlook.com. Users, after getting moved over to the new brand, the users would still have their Hotmail.com, Live.com or MSN.com email id; all the contacts, settings etc. are going to work under Outlook.com brand.

The transition process is going to be slow; first of all, the users who access Hotmail heavily would get an alert – they can immediately switch to Outlook.com or postpone it for some day. Eventually, by the end of this summer, all the users would be shifted to Outlook.com

And the transition has started; a lot of people joined Outlook.com during the preview phase. Many Hotmail users have been shifted to the new interface as well. The new environment is far better than Hotmail – there are many organization tools and the interface looks pretty clean and well-organized as well. Outlook.com looks like Metro, a variant of Windows 8. However, the new interface looks to have a connection with Hotmail. Though there are many people who, irrespective of what new the get, prefer to stick to the old system or the system they are familiar with. For them, it might be a different game altogether – otherwise, the transition from Hotmail to Outlook.com is something a lot of people are going to like.

Currently there are 60 million active users of Outlook.com. According to Microsoft, one third of their total active users are from Gmail; they have also said that not all the Gmail users have stopped using Gmail id, many are using both the email ids parallel.

As the transition from Hotmail to Outlook.com is over, there would be hundreds of millions of active users. This would give Gmail and Yahoo! Mail a tight competition. According to reports published in June 2012 and December 2012, Gmail had 425 million users and Yahoo! Mail had 281 million users.

The post Microsoft to Outlook.com – The Transition Started appeared first on SunTel Technologies Inc..

However, after the release of Microsoft Office 2013, many of the industry watchers are saying that it would make much sense for them to switch to an open source alternative such as LibreOffice or OpenOffice.

But what is the issue with Office 2013? Why people are taking a back and thinking twice whether to go with it or not? The reason is, with Office 2013, Microsoft is pushing a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Users need to pay annual maintenance fee instead of buying one-time license. The SaaS is known as Office 365; it will cost $99 per year for 5 users. Good for small companies or a family; however, you have to renew the subscription every year otherwise the software will not work.

Earlier it was not mandatory to upgrade; people could continue with one license for as long as they want. If someone is happy with Office 2003 and wants to continue with it for 10 years, that is perfectly fine. But now, with this changed policy, they have to renew the subscription fee every year to use the suite. The budget flexibility is not there; it imposes an ongoing liability of $100 every year forever.

Initially Microsoft started to push Office 365 as a yearly subscription model only; but after being heavily criticized, they made it an option. Hence, you can still purchase Office 365 as an application suite. Initially, when it launched, Microsoft announced that it can be only used on a single PC; hence, once installed, you cannot move it to another PC which might result in a difficult situation as your PC might get outdated or you might simply decide to buy a new, advanced system. The existing license would just not work then.

Though this stringent policy has been withdrawn, still, it is easy to predict to which direction it heads. When the next upgrade, Office 2016 releases, probably the subscription model will be mandatory.

Hence, before continuing with Microsoft Office 2013, a lot of people are considering the options such as Google Docs, OpenOffice, LibreOffice etc. By switching over to a new application now, you can get enough time in hand to become familiar with the interface. By the time Microsoft Office turns SaaS entirely, you become an expert of the new application.

The post Microsoft Office 2013 – Trends and Predictions appeared first on SunTel Technologies Inc..

Microsoft Surface Pro is significantly different from the tablets available in the market; though a lot of people try to put it in the same page with other tablets. Surface Pro features 4GB of RAM, Intel HD Graphics 4000, Intel Core i5 3317U, Mini DisplayPort and USB 3.0; it can be called an ultrabook, not a tablet. Moreover, it runs on Windows 8 Pro, which is highly unlikely for a tablet.

Surface Pro has Micron Solid State Drive of 64GB or 128GB; this makes it visible different from tablets and close variant of MacBook Air, Nexus 10 or iPad.

The Make, Design and Display

Like Surface RT, the casing of Surface Pro is made of Titanium colored VaporMg of 0.53-inch. There are integrated cooling vents and fans; to accommodate the cooling stuff, the casing is a bit thicker than that of Surface RT. However, Surface Pro is still lighter than any of the average ultrabooks. It only weights 2.5-pounds.

In terms of display, Surface Pro is superior than Dell’s XPS12 and visibly sharper than ThinkPad Yoga 11. The ThinkPad Yoga 11 has a pixel density of 135ppi; whereas Surface Pro has a pixel density of 208ppi. It might not be as good as iPad 4, but it’s not bad too. You can call it much above the average. It can properly show colors and pure white.

However, the device is not all good kind of a gadget. In order to make the text readable on high resolution display, Windows 8’s global magnification settings have been made 150%. Native Windows 8 apps look pretty well on it; but third party applications do not look good at all and text looks to be blurred. If you decide to go back to 100% magnification will not make the text much readable.

Overall, it is a good gadget to own. However, how much popularity will it gain is something that only future can disclose.

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