Why invest in an expensive PBX phone system when everything you need can be found in phones that simply plug right into your existing telephone jacks?

Most business telephone systems require all the phones in an office to be connected, individually, to a central control box or key service unit (KSU). The disadvantage is that the KSU and unique wiring require professional installation and programming, raising the cost and complexity of the system.

But, “non-KSU” phone systems do not require a central cabinet. Instead, each phone contains the circuitry necessary for features such as conferencing, intercom, and transfer. Installation is as easy as plugging in the phones.

Overview: Simple to install and use, this affordable multi-line speakerphone features Caller ID/Call Waiting when you subscribe to these services from your local telephone service provider. It also offers a convenient speakerphone, headset jack, 32-number speed-dial, and 3-way conferencing.

As your business expands, you can add additional telephones from within this AT&T series which can be networked into a system of up to 16 phones. Additional features include all-station paging, intercom, hold, call transfers between stations, four lighted line indicators, 16 intercom one-touch keys, two data ports, Centrex compatibility, and power failure protection.

The setup: For this review, we purchased one new ATT 1070 speakerphone (as well as an ATT 1080, which was necessary for testing features only available when using 2 or more phones of this phone system series). We connected each phone’s first two lines together, in a star topology, to distribute both lines of a two-line SIP adapter by Sipura using G.711u audio compression to our Asterisk 1.4 voice server.

As you can see by the picture on the right (click to zoom), all of the external telephone lines in your home or office must be wired to all phones. It is actually very common for homes and small offices to already have this wiring plan, so these new phones simply plug in where the old phones were once connected! Optionally, Line 4 can be shared by all phones, or unique as a “private line” exclusive to one phone, or a group of phones that might need a dedicated telephone number for external callers to reach them directly.

First thoughts: Unlike recent AT&T 4-line phones that looked more like a cheap, plastic, consumer-grade, home telephone trying to survive the daily abuse of an office environment, the telephones in this new series of “non-KSU” intercom phones (ATT 1040, ATT 1070, and ATT 1080) look and feel like professional business phones. It’s two-tone silver brushed metal and hard black plastic design fondly references back to the popular AT&T Merlin® KSU phone system of several decades ago.

The included manuals are outstanding! You receive a Quick Setup Guide, a Users Guide, and an Installation Guide. But these aren’t some tiny little pamphlet! Each of these books are about 50-150 pages, every page written in plain English, covering every single feature in a very clear and concise way to make sure you get your money’s worth out of everything this phone has to offer. (I have never been more impressed by documentation!) I found no typographical errors or confusing descriptions. The manuals really add some confidence to AT&T and the future of this new phone series!

The good: The four-way directional button and center “Enter” button become your primary tool to quickly and easily select features without the need to remember codes or special key sequences. In fact, all too often, these “non-KSU” phones will have buttons with two or more functions — not this new AT&T series! The buttons on the phone are self-explanatory and only serve the one function for which they are labeled. All related feature options appear on the blue backlit LCD screen when you are in a particular mode that offers more options. For example, when you lift the handset and press the Intercom button, the top half of the screen prompts “Intercom No.?” while the bottom half of the screen presents you to optionally “Page” a single extension (instead of simply ringing it) or to “Page All” and broadcast your announcement on all the phones in your home or office simultaneously.

Another improvement, which is why I suspect these phones aren’t backwards compatible with earlier AT&T “non-KSU” phones other than the 1000-series: the Intercom audio is digital, crystal clear. No longer will your Intercom calls be subjected to interference from a nearby radio station transmitter or other nuisance! With two phones side-by-side, you can detect a slight millisecond or so delay as an Intercom page is encoded on your phone to be then decoded on the destination phone. The sound quality is truly impressive and worthwhile. If you are currently experiencing any issues with your Intercom on older non-KSU phones, you might want to give a pair of these a test run.

The bad: If you transfer a call from one phone to the next, the caller hears nothing. No music-on-hold, no tones — nothing but silence. If they had offered an option to play a soft double-beep tone to the caller every couple of seconds, that would have been a worthwhile improvement over dead-air. (However, the ATT 1080 does play a “Please hold” recorded announcement every few seconds when a caller is transferring to an extension by way of the built-in auto attendent included on that ATT 1080 phone. But even that phone leaves the caller with dead air if they are put on hold or transferred by a human instead.)

UPDATE: We recommend adding the On Hold Plus Music On Hold 6500 system to play music-on-hold to your callers, which will solve the biggest problem in this otherwise perfect phone system.

One slight disappointment was with regards to the telephone recognizing when a caller on-hold had disconnected. I tried everything in my “toolkit” of test equipment, but it seems these phones just don’t recognize (or don’t care) when a caller that you’ve placed on-hold chooses to hang up before you return to the call. The system will continue to keep that line blinking on-hold until you retrieve it — often to the frustration of loud dialtone in your ear. Not a deal-breaker, just annoying.

It also would have been nice if the Hold button had a red-colored key for quick access. I realize its a minor complaint, but when you take a lot of calls it helps to have that button easy to find. I would suggest the purchase of a red permanent marker so you could do it yourself — you’ll thank me later!

The ugly: When integrated with an ATT 1080 with the “SYS EXT” voice messaging feature enabled, trying to figure out how to listen to your messages on any phone except the ATT 1080 is a huge headache! For a phone system that is so “menu-driven” by that directional navigation and “enter” button arrangement near the LCD screen, it is irritating to have to dig out a reference card to use this ATT 1070 phone to listen to your messages in the mailbox reserved exclusively for your extension but actually recorded and stored on the ATT 1080 voicemail/answering system. It just seems to me this could have been better thought out!

My guess is that AT&T would probably “recommend” that you purchase an ATT 1080 phone for every person who needs a voicemail/answering system, instead of using one ATT 1080 to serve voicemail for multiple ATT 1070 phone users as their advertising suggests.

Conclusion: Overall, this is the best four-line telephone AT&T has ever made! If you’ve ever experienced issues with any of the earlier four-line models, such as the ATT984, ATT974, ATT964, ATT955, ATT945, or ATT944. The 1040, 1070, and 1080 have been redesigned from the ground-up and the attention to quality really shows!! All advertised features worked beautifully, each button pressed produced the expected result — press the Transfer button while on a call, the LCD prompts “Transfer line to ?”. By keeping one function per button, and also utilizing the navigation menu-driven options through the phone’s display, anyone can easily figure out how to do anything on these phones without ever needing to read any of the documentation.

The speakerphone sounds nice, although the volume of the speaker could’ve been louder (in my opinion). Each phone allows you to control the ringing tone, volume, and delay ringing options for each line individually. Believe it or not, that level of control of line ringing assignments are usually reserved for KSU systems only! Intercom calling worked flawlessly. All-Page was loud and very practical for a busy home with an office, small business, or retail shop.

With a cost of about $100 per phone, these are an outstanding value for any large home or growing business with 2 or more phone lines looking for the simplicity of replacing their old phones with something more serious, flexible, and functional.

                    

• Free, Immediate Account Activation (No Spammer Trickery!)
• Free, Unlimited Conference Calls for Personal or Business Use
• Up to 1,000 Callers Connected per Conference Call
• Reservation-less, Available 24/7
• High Quality and 10-Year Proven Reliability
• Dedicated U.S. Phone Number and Access Code (No Computer Required!)
• Real-time Conference Control via Web or iPhone App
• Free Recording, Download, and Playback
• E-mailed Call Report after each Conference Call

From the advice of one of our customers, we setup a free account at FreeConferenceCall.com but remained a bit skeptical of a conference call hosting service that was absolutely free.  According to their website, “If you’re paying for conference calls, you’re paying too much!”  I can tell you, first hand, this is a worthwhile service and I’d easily and confidently recommend it.

Disclaimer:  We have no relationship with this company whatsoever and receive no referral commissions of any kind for signing up people to their service.  Rather, we were so impressed with the convenience and call quality that we wanted to share this valuable resource with our web audience.  (If you know of a  service or product that you believe we should review next, send us an e-mail and tell us about it!)

If I told you that there was a company offering completely 100% free teleconference calling, that would be a pretty good deal by itself right?  Well, it’s nothing new.  FreeConferenceCall.com has been providing free conference calling for about 10 years and they’re really good at it.  So good in fact, they just added some upgrades that made me take notice.  If you have ever needed a conference for a quick way to connect family and friends, looking to offer group training, launching a new business campaign, or just need a phone number where hundreds of people can connect to participate in a presentation and Q&A discussion, look no further than FreeConferenceCall.com!

Awesome Feature #1.  Beautiful, simple web interface. They have an online account management system that allows you, as the conference host, to login and visually see the details of every participant in your conference call.  You can select an individual and mute their audio so they don’t disturb the rest of the conference, assign each Caller ID number a name or description of your choice so you’ll know who’s who, and when you open the discussion for Q&A you will visually see which user is talking so even if they don’t say who they are, you’ll know.  It’s an awesome interface that is very responsive in real-time.  Oh yeah… did I forget to mention that FreeConferenceCall.com can RECORD the entire conference (up to 6 hours) for you so you can download it later, post it to your website, or add it to your podcast?  All at no charge whatsoever!

Awesome Feature #2. iPhone App. Just released, this quick download from Apple’s App Store puts this powerful conference service in the palm of your hand.  Can you imagine creating, connecting, and managing a conference call, in real-time, of hundreds of participants all from the touch-screen of your iPhone?

As you can see from the screen snapshots, you have the voice call in the background using your bluetooth headset or speakerphone and all of your conference controls are on-screen.  No more remembering special codes or having conference participants hear touch tones as you fumble to control features!

Awesome Feature #3.  It’s FREE!! Yes, it is really free. Why?  Well, they hope that you upgrade to their toll-free conferencing service or dedicated, no PIN code service.  For the free service, they assign you a PIN code that’s yours to keep and all your conference call participants access the conference call through a telephone number assigned from the 712 area code.  Get assigned some PIN code you don’t like?  No problem at all to click a button on your web account management and get a new PIN code assigned within seconds.  Don’t like that new one?  Keep clicking the button until you get a six-digit number you like.  As long as you occasionally use the service every once in a while, that PIN code is assigned to no one else and is yours to keep!

Why Would I Use It?

There are many great reasons to get yourself a free account so you, too, can create an almost unlimited party conference call.  We use ours for connecting with customers, collaboration on projects with other companies, and organizing discussions with technology partners.  Borrowed from their website, here are some other applications:

• Regional / National Sales Meetings
• New Product Training / Launches
• Multi-Vendor Conferences
• Project Management Team Meetings
• Cross Functional / Divisional Meetings
• Crisis Response Meetings
• Teaching / Educational Seminars
• Motivational Seminars
• School Group / Organization Meetings
• Sports Teams Meetings
• Distributing Anonymous Phone Numbers To Your Online Friends
• Family Reunions
• Religious / Bible Study Groups

Getting Started!

If you don’t have an iPhone, that’s okay.  You can use ANY phone you want.  Even a PC is only required to register, but not needed to run the conference call.  Click here to be taken directly to the free registration page on FreeConferenceCall.com, enter your name and e-mail, then click submit.  They e-mail you back with all the details to connect, host, and manage the conference call.

If you do have an Apple iPhone, you’ll want to get the free App from the App Store or click here to be redirected to their iPhone-specific web page to register for free and read about their new iPhone App that makes this conference calling amazingly simple!

The web account management page will display your conference call dial in number, an access code for you to enter as the “host” of the conference, and an access code to give out to your callers who will be participants. Print this page by clicking on the button in the upper right hand corner.

Now, start using your free conference call.  The service is available immediately, with no advertisements or spam.  Your callers will have no idea you are using a “free” conference calling service at all…. unless they’ve read this article too (and in that case, you know you’re both fiscally smart people!)

                    

One of the unavoidable things about college, and increasingly work life, is PowerPoint. Most of us have, at one point or another, had to slap some slides together and give a presentation to our friends, family, class, co-workers, or boss.

Good PowerPoint presentations are more fun, more impactful, and more impressive to listen to. And all they do differently is follow a few simple guidelines.

The New 10 Commandments of PowerPoint Presentations

1. Thou shall be seen.

Ensure your text is large enough to be read easily by those sitting in the back of thy presentation room, suggesting 36 point font as your minimum. Use text, graphics, and colors that have high contrast with the background that are appropriate, complementary, and visually pleasing.

2. Thou shall make points, not paragraphs.

There is no reason to ever have more than a few words per slide.  Follow the 6 by 6 rule, which is using no more than six words per line and no more than six lines/bullet points per slide. Or, think of it like Twitter: If you can’t get your point across briefly, you need to further narrow your point.

3. Thou shall not only use text.

Pictures say a thousand words and videos are usually more interesting than you are.  Images, video clips, and sound bites vary the tempo and feel of the presentation. However, limit video and audio to no longer than 10-20% of your total presentation time.

4. Thou shall not bullet.

A bulleted list looks like something I’m not going to want to read.  Think like a graphic designer and use colors, fonts, and spacing to make your presentation more appealing to the eye.  Organize your content well and try to avoid using the big black dots.

5. Thou shall not over-clutter.

Generally speaking, an audience wants one or two things to focus on per slide, whether it’s a point of text or an image.  You need to balance your content with white space to ensure an uncluttered, aesthetic composition and a logic to your arrangement that audiences can easily follow.

6. Thou shall not use transitions.

Transitions are the optional animations between slides and really should be deleted from PowerPoint entirely!  No transitions ever, ever, ever. Keep it simple. But, do use “black-out” slides in your presentation at times when you want the audience to focus exclusively on you without distraction.

7. Thou shall cite thy work.

You must cite sources for any image, graphic, or text on the slide in which that material is presented.  Also, your presentation should include a works cited slide(s) visible immediately after your conclusion.

8. Thou shall not read the slides.

Your slides are a visual aid to enhance your speech, not replace it. Use slides as a jumping-off point for other things. Establish and maintain eye contact with your audience, not the screen.  You are the presenter, not PowerPoint.

9. Thou shall rehearse.

Things can go wrong sometimes.  You may easily find a typographical error on a slide or some slides may be in the wrong order than what you thought. Rehearse your presentation at least once — it’ll automatically make your speech better-sounding and better-timed when you do it for real.

10. Thou shall know less is more.

The key to a good presentation is how short it is.  Try not to ramble or add unnecessary information. Design presentations that are visually interesting, integrate well with your message, and engage the audience.  A great presentation should leave your audience wanting more!

Copyright 2009 Matt Rygelski. May be reprinted for educational/instructional use with appropriate citation.

                    

“Since switching to Mr. Rygelski, who personally came out to reprogram my machine, I have cut my processing fees by 50%. I highly recommend Mr. Rygelski for credit card processing and machines, as he is the first fair person I have found for credit card processing rates and is easy to contact for customer service.”

-Dr. David Mitchell
The Country Doctor, Ltd.
Shiloh, Illinois

The Company
The Country Doctor, Ltd. is a small medical practice with a growing patient list.  It’s primary focus is to keep operating costs as low as possible so as to spend more time with the patient addressing his or her individual needs in a pace that is relaxed and informative.  Every patient sees the doctor personally, not a nurse or aide, and Dr. Mitchell knows every patient by name and personality.

The Challenge
Processing credit card payments had become increasingly more expensive throughout the years.  Previously, Dr. Mitchell would spend hours searching the Internet for better processing rates or calling around to competitor banks for quotes only to be discouraged by increasingly complex fee schedules and general frustration.  Knowing that many younger patients pay by credit card and rarely have cash, he needed to find a processor who he could trust would deliver what they promised.

The Solution
Phonewire partnered with AccountFirst, NABC to design a personalized credit card processing rate schedule for Dr. Mitchell specifically tuned to his credit transaction volume and average ticket sale.  Doing so, Dr. Mitchell is now saving several thousands of dollars per year by securing a lower processing rate, adding Discover and American Express acceptance, and insisting on a faster ACH bank deposit of daily batch totals in 48 hours or less instead of the weeks often delayed deposit of funds by his previous processor.  He now gets paid faster and with less fees and lower processing rates, allowing him to continue his practice profitably and attract new, younger patients.

                    

Tax time is one of those events in a small business that quickly creates a pile of paperwork that is just no longer needed.  I’m not suggesting you shred everything, as the IRS might frown on that one!  But let’s be honest, you really don’t need to keep every vendor invoice, bank statement, utility bill, customer fax, health benefits or insurance statement, or financial investments summary.

Unfortunately, you can just toss it in the trash as they each contain very privileged and confidential information that criminals and competitors would love to get their hands on!   To be trusted by your customers, you need to invest in a shredder and take their personal, confidential information as seriously as you take your own.

Why Not Just Any Ol’ Cheapo Shredder?

For small business use, you really can’t just run down to Target or Walmart and purchase a little home office shredder expecting it to last too long.  They just don’t build those cheapo residential shredders for any reasonable use!  I know, I’ve been through three in two years!!

The cheap ones overheat easily and usually only eat 5 or so pages at a time.  Do you really have free time to separate that pile into 5 sheets or less?  Can you afford to wait for the shredder to cool down?  Of course not.

Enter the Fellowes SB-89Ci

The Fellowes SB-89Ci shredder is easily the best shredder under $200!  Every feature is a direct result of customer feedback from office users just like yourself.  Anti-jam technology, safety shut off hand proximity sensor, visible window to know when its getting full, and cross-cut shredding security are just to name a few.

This thing has teeth!  It will tear up paper, CDs, credit cards, envelopes, staples, paperclips, ID cards… anything you could imagine, this powerful device will destroy any evidence of their previous existence.  It is really fantastic and works like a horse.  Never any delays, jams, or overheats after almost a half an hour of use!  I couldn’t recommend it more highly, and we’ve got the absolute best price that you just won’t find anywhere else — delivered right to your day in a day or two!

Look, we’ve all heard the horrors of identify theft but you’ve also got competitor theft to worry about!  Seventy-five percent of all crime are crimes of “convenience” and opportunity.  Don’t make it easy for you or your business to be a “convenient” target.  Isn’t your confidential paperwork, digital security, and piece of mind worth a modest $200?

                    

Because of their quick message delivery via email/text, our response time to our clients, tenants and potential clients is among the fastest in the local industry. Spencer Realty Professionals is known for great communication, quick reply and excellent service. We couldn’t possibly have achieved such status without Phonewire and Matt’s personal attention to his business. Thanks Matt!”

Sean Spencer
Spencer Reality Professionals

Service Category: 24/7 Live Answering Services
Year first hired: 2006
Top Qualities: Good Value, High Integrity, Creative

                    

Rex Klein
Barryhund Administrators Inc.

Service Category: 24/7 Live Answering Services

                    

Ben Blakley
CEO, CANFONE.COM
http://www.canfone.com

Service Category: 24/7 Live Answering Services
Top qualities: Great Results, Good Value, Creative

                    

Keith Tessler
Chief Operations Officer, The Pros Entertainment Services, Inc.
http://www.thepros.com/

Service Category: 24/7 Live Answering Services
Top qualities: Personable, Good Value, On Time

                    

John Cureton
Urban Harvest Partnership / UHP Wireless Networks
http://www.uhpwireless.com

Service Category: 24/7 Live Answering Services
Top qualities: Great Results, Personable, Good Value