eNewsletter—Spring 2010
Welcome to the first issue of the Cypress Communications quarterly newsletter featuring ideas and tips on how you can leverage communications—and specifically, cloud–based communications—to improve organizational performance. Articles in each issue will focus on industry trends and highlight ways that your peers are leveraging hosted unified communications to benefit their businesses.
While these have been challenging times for many, they have also presented an opportunity to redefine possibility and to perform beyond our expectations. Collectively, we‘ve seen new possibilities as Captain Sulley safely landed his crippled plane on the Hudson River and watched as our Olympic athletes set new records for speed and endurance, being rewarded for their performance with medals of gold, silver or bronze. Satisfaction of a job well done is a sweet reward within itself, but others judging your achievements to be superior provides a testimony and validity that is hard to obtain any other way.
As for Cypress, we recently took a few moments to relish our own accomplishments when the company and its solutions were featured in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). Although there were no gold medals, it was definitely rewarding for industry experts to recognize our vision, as well as our commitment to progressive technology and customer service. Read More
Yours truly,
Linda Collins
Vice President Customer Care
Cypress Communications
Nortel/GENBAND Update
As the recession tightened its grip on the world in January 2009, news hit that the telecom industry giant, Nortel, had filed for bankruptcy. In December of that year, Nortel announced that GENBAND, a provider of high–performance gateway solutions, entered a bid to acquire “substantially all” of Nortel’s Carrier VoIP and Application Solutions (CVAS) assets, which are a logical extension of the services GENBAND already offers. The bid attained first-round approvals by March 2010 in the Canadian and U.S. courts, with only a few more formalities before the acquisition is finalized. Read More
Prepare your business before the unthinkable happens
We have far too many reminders of how devastating natural disasters can be. Just as Haiti and Chile begin recovering from the shattering effects of major earthquakes, U.S. businesses face yet another season of massive flooding in the plains, wildfires in the west and tornadoes all around. Add in the predictions of “a much more active” 2010 hurricane season with “above normal threats on the U.S. coastline” by AccuWeather.com’s Hurricane Center meteorologists, and 2010 could turn out to be a record year for natural disasters.
And when a disaster strikes, businesses can’t put a “to be continued…” sign up on their front doors, especially as research shows that the majority of SMEs who experience an interruption lasting 10 days or more never fully recover, and most close within two years. Therefore, employees need to be prepared to continue working productively in the face of any situation. Read More
809, 284, 649 and 876 Area Code Scam
Over the past 10 or so years, the 809, 284, 649 or 876 area codes have been used in fraudulent pay–per–call scams. The scam typically works like this: a person receives an urgent voicemail or email with instructions to dial a number beginning with 809, 284, 649 or 876. Unknowingly, the caller dials an international call and is connected to a fraudulent pay–per–call operator, kept on the phone for an extended period, racking up high international charges. Refer to the FCC web site at http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/809.html for more information on this scam.
Your Questions: Answered
In this issue, we’ll focus on a question regarding C4 IP Unified Messaging (UM) functionality.
Q: With UM, what is the difference between having my voicemails forwarded to my email and setting up IMAP?
A: Either option enables your voicemails to be automatically turned into .wav files, attached to an email and sent to your inbox.
If you just forward your voicemails to your email inbox and listen to them as .wav files, then voicemails will not be marked as “read” on your desktop phone and your message waiting light will remain on.
Conversely, IMAP synchronizes your emailed voicemails and your desktop phone, so if a message is marked as “read” or deleted in your inbox, the status change occurs on your phone as well. Use IMAP to ensure that your message waiting light will be turned off when you listen to your messages—even if you don’t use your desktop phone. Read More
