ShoreTel Technology Solutions
IP Phone Systems:
For the best VoIP business communications solution—start with a solid platform
Say Goodbye To Communications Complexity
Tired of managing multiple vendors and dial plans, complicated phone system protocols, or restrictive network solutions? Want a business phone system that "just works," no matter your size, industry or need?
ShoreTel IP business phone systems are designed from the ground up to streamline the work of administrators and end users alike. Whether you want to stop managing your phone system entirely and are looking for a cloud solution, or you want to maintain control and management and are looking for the best on-premises phone system, ShoreTel has what you need.
What Is An IP Phone System?
At the heart of every business phone system is the PBX (Private Branch Exchange), which makes connections among the internal telephones of a business or other private organization and connect them to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Traditional hard-wired PBX systems evolved in the 1990s to use Internet Protocol (IP) to carry calls. An IP PBX uses Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and can also be known as a VoIP PBX, IP-PBX, virtual PBX or IPBX.
IP PBX phone systems perform four main call processing duties:
- Establishing connections between the telephone sets of two users
- Maintaining the connections as long as needed
- Disconnecting the connections when the users hang up
- Providing information for accounting purposes
An IP PBX system consists VoIP enabled phones and an IP PBX. The phones register with the IP PBX server, and when they make a call the IP PBX establishes the connection. VoIP phones can be simple software-based softphones or purpose-built hardware devices that appear much like an ordinary telephone or a cordless phone.
ShoreTel integrates communication features such as video conferencing, instant messaging (IM), mobility and online collaboration into a single easy-to-use IP PBX solution. Eliminating separate tools is only one way that ShoreTel's brilliantly simple VoIP phone systems help boost productivity and reduce costs.
ShoreTel For Managed Cloud Phone Systems
ShoreTel is focused on providing brilliantly simple communications solutions, and that's why we offer a smarter cloud-based phone system, with flexibility and service beyond just dial tone. We've been voice specialists since the beginning of the VoIP revolution. We provide a wide range of business phone products and services that address organization’s business communication needs – no matter how large or complex. Our cloud-based phone system is at the heart of what we do: easy to install, easy to use, available throughout the U.S., and works anywhere in the world.
Most hosted cloud business phone service providers utilize core technology that is developed and maintained by a third party. But ShoreTel is an "end-to-end" provider, from the phones to the platform to the applications software—so of course we built our own hosted platform in the cloud. Our cloud phone system is the key to our solution and is engineered for highest reliability and functionality.
Our technology tailors the user experience for companies who put a premium on sales and service and consider the phone to be a strategic part of their business. It allows us to integrate more tightly with other business applications and to have granular data measuring everything we manage.
ShoreTel For Onsite Business Phone Systems
Built to leverage the power of VoIP telephony, ShoreTel IP phone systems have pioneered a fundamentally different approach to IP PBX. Thanks to its ingenious purpose-built single-image architecture, a ShoreTel on-premises communications platform grows across as many sites, or as many continents, as you need. IT staff can manage your entire VoIP phone system with plug-and-play ease using a single browser-based interface. And because it is an open system, it integrates with popular business applications, enabling you to get more out of your most valuable assets: people and information.
The ShoreTel distributed architecture is incorporated into a unique on-site, appliance-based, IP PBX platform with no single point of failure: each switch and site functions as an independent call processor. In the event of wide area network (WAN) failure, the phone system continues to place and receive calls on the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). This gives customers 99.999% availability for 100% peace of mind.
ShoreTel's on-premises IP PBX phone system offers the lowest TCO in the industry. Many customers report a return of investment within a year. Over the long term, the unified communications tools of a ShoreTel business VoIP telephone system reduce costs company-wide by streamlining business processes, putting critical information in reach, and eliminating both missed calls and the need for expensive third-party conference services.
Unified Communications:
Integrated, "complexity-free" voice, messaging, conferencing, video and web sharing
How We Communicate Today
Business phone systems hardly changed after they were introduced in the 1950s: an on-location PBX managed multiple phone lines and routed calls. Sure, there were technical advances and add-on services enhanced performance, but communication was basically limited to voice.
Today, however, there are countless ways to email, text, buddy, share, video chat, conference—and place a call. This brings tremendous advantage by increasing the speed of business. But it also spawns equally tremendous complexity. How can IT departments keep up with administering and securing a multitude of applications? Fortunately, there's a better way.
ShoreTel Makes Unified Communications Easy
Enter ShoreTel. We build phone systems with unified communications (UC) built in, not bolted on. This means that we integrate all the key components for robust business communications—voice, email, instant messaging, presence (i.e., being able to check the availability of a co-worker), calendaring, video and audio conferencing and desktop sharing—into one seamless package.
Other vendors provide pieces of this puzzle. They may offer a desktop sharing solution. Or they may offer video calling, or messaging. But it's rare to find a company that offers an entire suite of enterprise-quality quality communications tools designed as integral pieces of the the core IP PBX business phone system.
ShoreTel is that company. Our UC solutions eliminate communications complexity for both end users and system administrators. We "purpose-built" our VoIP business phone solution to ensure that all components worked with minimal configuration and maximum flexibility, to relieve IT departments (and their budgets) of the cumbersome, complicated and redundant tasks required by systems from other vendors.
Truly Unified Means Multi-Site And Mobile
It's one thing to offer unified communications inside an office. Where ShoreTel shines is in our ability to extend this communications suite across campuses, into remote locations, and even into home offices. We have two unique platforms—the signature distributed architecture of our onsite ShoreTel Connect ONSITE and our fully hosted and managed cloud service, ShoreTel Connect CLOUD—and both are ideally suited for companies that have multiple locations or that need to scale. You never have to worry about out-growing a ShoreTel phone system. You never face a forklift upgrade with us.
Truly unified also means fully functioning desktop features on the mobile devices you love. Whether using a smartphone, a tablet or wearable device (like the Apple Watch), you and your employees deserve the ability to BYOD—that's bring your own device—and use it to transfer calls, host web share sessions, video chat, check co-worker availability and more.
Truly Unified Means Application Integration
Unifying communications means blurring the lines that separate your business processes. By introducing phone system functionality and metrics into applications that track and measure contacts—like customer relationship management software (CRM), applicant tracking systems (ATS), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and cost accounting programs—you open doors to better management.
When the systems are fused together, each becomes more powerful, employees become more productive and better business intelligence starts to emerge. "What's measured improves," and your ShoreTel phone system can play a role in optimizing staffing levels, evaluating employee performance, analyzing marketing spend and understanding customer behavior. Just like with mobile devices, it is not what your phone system does that makes it “smart,” it’s what it knows.
Collaboration:
Go beyond simple dialtone—your phone system can be so much more
Making Teamwork Easier
In today's anytime-anywhere workplace, putting powerful business communication and collaboration tools in the hands of the workforce is essential to staying competitive. Easy to deploy, and intuitive to use, ShoreTel Connect collaboration harnesses the power and flexibility of our brilliantly simple technologies to deliver full-featured collaboration tools – including instant messaging, reservationless audio conferencing, and multi-presenter desktop sharing.
Easy To Use Means Easy On IT
Unlike other collaboration solutions, which can create heavy support burdens on IT staff, ShoreTel Connect's integrated collaboration tools are intuitive to master, and require no complicated software downloads for participants. With users self-reliant in scheduling, managing, and participating in their audio conferences and online sharing sessions, IT pros are freed up to focus on more strategic, business-building projects. ShoreTel Collaboration enables teams to engage and to share with a single click, without help from IT, and on the devices of their choice – PCs, Macs, iOS, and Android devices. ShoreTel Collaboration takes the hassle out of bringing teams together, and puts the focus on true creative sharing.
Seamless Application Integration
Tight integration with popular business applications such as Microsoft Outlook gives users an equally streamlined experience. Pressing the “Conference” button in the Outlook ribbon transforms a mere calendar appointment into a multimedia work session, automatically creating dial-in and web sharing information. And whether reviewing a spreadsheet or following a presentation, external participants can view the shared desktop over the web without needing to download additional applications or installing plug-ins.
ShoreTel's open APIs encourage feature integration. Rather than silo particular features with standalone interfaces and protocols, ShoreTel brings them together for the most impact: presence AND mobility; instant messaging AND contact center. The result is truly "unified" communications, which powers an uptick in performance and productivity. And integrations with sales and marketing applications like Salesforce, NetSuite and ZenDesk open new avenues to cross-functional collaboration.
A Rich Developer Ecosystem
ShoreTel builds collaboration into everything we do, and we encourage collaboration in others. Our Innovation Network is a growing community of technology companies that leverage our open architecture to develop hardware, software and services that extend the capabilities of our core solutions. These enhancements increase the value of your ShoreTel system by providing utilities specific to your unique needs.
Mobility:
Integrate smartphones, tablets and wearable devices into your phone system
Stay Connected Everywhere. Always.
The phenomenal growth of mobile communications offers businesses tremendous advantages. Make sure your company offers your mobile workers the flexibility they crave while giving your IT staff the control they require.
The ShoreTel Connect mobility app enables businesses of all sizes to integrate their employees' favorite smartphones and tablets with their existing phone system−securely, simply, and cost-effectively. Employees can BYOD (bring your own device) and stay connected from any location around the world on any network— Wi-Fi, 3G/4G, or cellular— while keeping business and personal calls completely separate.
Always Available, Always Secure
Never lose a mobile call connection when you walk inside your building again. With ShoreTel Connect mobility, dropped calls due to building design and materials that inhibit cellular radio transmission are a thing of the past. ShoreTel Connect helps your organization take control of in-building coverage problems by leveraging Wireless LAN networks to provide wireless coverage across your entire enterprise.
ShoreTel Connect's least-cost routing not only routes cellular calls via the cheapest path inside and outside the enterprise, but it is also one of the only solutions to use VoIP over WLAN on leading iOS / Apple and Android smartphones, tablets, and Apple wearable devices. This drives international costs down while increasing user productivity.
ShoreTel Mobility secures mobile enterprise communications by leveraging proven standards for authentication and encryption with X.509 digital certificates and AES-256 encryption. The solution preserves both simplicity and maximum security by automatically recognizing when the user is outside the enterprise firewall, and automatically launching in response an application-layer SSL VPN.
Rich Communication Features
ShoreTel Connect gives iOS and Android devices the same productivity-boosting features that unify communications for workers in the office—like video conferencing with room-based systems, peer-to-peer video, web conferencing, calendar access, CRM integration, instant messaging, and presence—as well as desk phone features like extension dialing, conference calling, company directory, hold, and call transfer.
The Connect mobility app's "Today" screen shows scheduled audio conference calls, with a simple "Join" button to connect immediately--with GoToMeeting and WebEx calls supported, too. And ShoreTel Connect supports ShoreTel Conferencing, enabling iOS users to participate fully in collaboration sessions, viewing spreadsheets, presentations, and work sessions from others' desktops.
Keep It Professional
ShoreTel Connect allows users to separate their business and personal communications on a single device, a "dual persona" solution that maintains separate identities. Employees will never give a customer their personal mobile number again. instead, their company number follows them from desk to field. And managers can rest easy knowing that customer lists stay with the company, not the employee.
Contact Center:
Customer communication can only be as good as your call center solution
Making Every Contact Count
No matter what size your business, you know that customer satisfaction is tied to repeat business and your company's reputation. Personalizing your service opens the opportunity to upsell and cross sell, and having staff available at the times your customers want to reach you can earn loyalty.
The right contact center can make it easy to optimize your resources, improve response times, route calls effectively, and access account data—so customers feel valued and trust your brand.
Flexible Enough For Every Size Business
ShoreTel offers flexible contact center solutions - from smaller, less formal environments to large organizations requiring multimedia, sophisticated routing, enhanced reporting options, self-service, and outbound campaign capabilities. ShoreTel's best-of-breed approach for supporting the leading CRM and enterprise management applications enables organizations to deploy a complete, integrated contact center solution that meets unique and changing business requirements.
There is no room in the client relationship for downtime. None. At the heart of every ShoreTel contact center solution is one of our highly reliable phone service platforms, with redundancy and virtualization support built in. This, combined with the high availability and disaster recovery features in ShoreTel Contact Center solutions, helps protect the call center from WAN and system failures. ShoreTel offers advanced multimedia and outbound capabilities in an all-in-one contact center solution that can run in the same server, minimizing your administrative demands and lowering the TCO.
Purpose-Built For Easy Implementation
For years, IT departments have faced the unenviable challenge of integrating a “bolt-on” contact center application with the enterprise business phone solution. Customers don’t make a distinction between calls to the contact center and calls to the front desk, so why should your technology? With ShoreTel phone systems, the contact center is tightly integrated into the service, reducing implementation headaches and creating a more consistent calling experience for your customers.
ShoreTel contact center solutions offer both agents and supervisors powerful and consolidated capabilities, regardless of location. Features include Interactive Voice Response (IVR), intelligent routing, outbound, and media handling. Through complete unified communications integration, call centers can now achieve single call resolution with functionality that lets agents communicate both externally and internally effectively using voice, Web chat, email, instant messaging.
Agents and supervisors can also take advantage of the latest telecommuting features while still leveraging powerful dashboard, reporting, and unified management capabilities. Contact center managers easily create real-time and historical reports to measure performance against business goals, while empowering agents to leverage customer relationship management information, resulting in improved productivity.
Amplify Team Performance
Because ShoreTel contact center solutions integrate seamlessly with existing CRM applications such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you get more out of your two most important assets: people and information. Our out-of-the-box integration with the most popular CRM applications used by contact center operators reduces the cost and complexity of deploying these solutions.
Applications Integration:
Phone systems with Open APIs offer packaged and customized enhancements
Business Is Fueled By Information
Application integration can deliver on the promise of unified communications by tying organizational communications into core business processes. CRM, ERP, and applicant tracking systems are the repository and management instrument for business information; application integration serves as a force multiplier by weaving call record data, customer account information, and activity trends into reports that release their true productivity and analytic potential.
These innovative solutions help to increase employee productivity, shorten response times, encourage collaboration, and improve customer satisfaction. The result is a more efficient and profitable enterprise, increasing the return on investment of both the communications platform and the customer's existing business applications.
Business Is Fueled By Speed
Application integration helps businesses work smarter by supporting the kind of informed decisions that can vault a company into a higher operational level. But don't underestimate the power of more efficient work flows. When agents can save 20 seconds per call placed by using click-to-call, in-bound screen pops relate not just who's calling but why, or all records are entered automatically not haphazardly by hand - the incremental time savings and data capture become a quantifiable financial advantage.
ShoreTel's applications integrations work seamlessly and naturally. They require no additional training for users, who get on board quickly and use the tools intuitively. Adoption rates are important to generate necessary return on business process apps; ShoreTel raises adoption rates by automating processes and by providing enhanced, actionable metrics that encourage use.
The ShoreTel Advantage
ShoreTel's support of open standards include Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Open APIs offer customers even more flexibility to integrate leading business process applications with their business communications systems, providing greater capabilities for system administrators and end users.
The programmatic interfaces available in the ShoreTel Innovation Network allow the creation of rich new applications and integrate the telephony features of ShoreTel's business communications system into central, back-office systems.
In addition, the ShoreTel Advanced Applications team leverages the ShoreTel phone system’s open interfaces to customize applications, and help organizations create unique solutions with maximum business value.
Because ShoreTel designs and develops a complete, end-to-end business phone solution—from the phones, to the IP PBX platform, to the call handling software, to advanced features of collaboration, mobility, and contact center—our application integrations are assured to be fully functional and optimized across all system touchpoints.
Virtualization:
Leverage your data center investment by virtualizing your phone system
Complements ShoreTel's Highly Reliable Onsite Architecture
Every company has unique needs from their communication systems. ShoreTel provides customers the choice to pick the deployment model that best suits their needs--offering the ultimate flexibility via "mix-and-match" implementation options across a distributed architectural platform. Customers can choose to implement ShoreTel purpose-built appliances, virtualized applications, or a combination of both.
The ability to virtualize key applications complements ShoreTel’s distributed architecture and allows customers to take advantage of virtualized infrastructure benefits, such as server consolidation, increased security, operational flexibility, and higher applications availability during planned and unplanned downtime in order to achieve cost savings and business continuity objectives.
Virtualized Unified Communications Platform
ShoreTel Unified Communications Platform applications, including call control, collaboration, mobility, and system administration, can be installed on industry-standard x86 servers located in a data center or on-premises. These applications are virtualized enhancements of the core software embedded on our signature ShoreTel Voice Switches, ShoreTel Mobility Routers, and ShoreTel Service Appliance hardware.
Unlike other phone system providers that force you to choose to deploy your entire system with either hardware-based or virtual appliances, ShoreTel's unique distributed architecture allows for "mix-and-match" implementation--all managed via a single Web-based interface. Customers who have already invested in ShoreTel solid-state appliances can add new services via virtualization and the integrity of the single-image administration will be maintained.
Customers can choose to deploy our core UC Platform software virtually, but backup the solution with physical ShoreTel Voice Switches. Customers who have already invested in data center virtualization but wish to maintain local PSTN connectivity for remote offices can deploy a mixed system: virtualized at headquarters, with ShoreTel Voice Switches in the field.
ShoreTel partners with VMware to deliver the fully virtualized ShoreTel experience including Unified Communications Platform, system administration, Unified Messaging, Enterprise Contact Center, Mobility Router, and ShoreTel Collaboration. ShoreTel HQ and DVS servers (providing virtualized instances of our system administration, unified messaging, and Enterprise Contact Center applications) are supported with Microsoft’s Hyper-V.
Virtualized Contact Center And Desktop
Running ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center in a virtual environment benefits customers in many ways. When deployed on a shared hardware resource in a data center, VMware Ready-certified Enterprise Contact Center not only provides complete multimedia and outbound capabilities, but also ensures high level of application availability, improved operational effectiveness, and reduced hardware and energy costs thanks to its efficient use of the VMware platform.
ShoreTel Connect ONSITE is supported in diverse virtualized environments, including Citrix XenApp and other thin-client environments. Using desktop virtualization and leveraging the simplicty of ShoreTel's user applications, customers are able to onboard employees or contractors in short order. It also enhances the overall UC TCO by eliminating client-specific installation and configuration, while cutting application helpdesk support cost due to reduction in application conflicts.