A total of 71 percent of those responding to the survey said that they are OK with being interrupted while on their summer vacations. That percentage included:

• 32 percent who said that email is the best way to reach them,
• 20 percent preferred to be contacted by phone, and
• 18 percent preferred text messages.

Interestingly, of the 29 percent who said it is never appropriate to contact them while on vacation, more than 7 out of 10 are over the age of 45.

Eighty-seven percent of those responding to the survey also preferred email for communicating with coworkers and business contacts while in the office. Of those responding, 31 percent said that voicemail is their least favorite mode of communication, followed by instant messaging (29 percent), and texting (26 percent).

The survey was conducted online from May 12-16, 2011 among 2,398 U.S. adults. Respondents were full- and part-time employed adults in the U.S. who have colleagues.

How accessible will you be on your next vacation?

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What You Get

OnSIP offers most of the features one would expect from such systems, including call routing, voicemail, business hours rules, and advanced features like on-demand conference bridging and text chat from your browser. The service doesn’t offer faxing, though.

OnSIP doesn’t sell IP phones. Instead, the company web site offers useful reviews of hardware you may wish to purchase, along with detailed instructions on how to set them up. You can also choose to use an analog telephone adapter (ATA) to make an connection between the Internet and a standard phone, or you can use a softphone to connect directly from your computer. Most web workers will find the setup process fairly simple, but OnSIP doesn’t offer pre-configured phones the way RingCentral does.

The folks at OnSIP kindly sent me a Polycom SoundPoint IP 450 to test the service. This is a very nice phone, and worked well with OnSIP. Like a number of other IP phones, it doesn’t include a standard headset jack, opting instead for an RJ-10 connection, meaning that headsets are more expensive than you may be used to. But the speakerphone quality on the Polycom is excellent, and I found that both my callers and I liked the results.

Options and Pricing

OnSIP has chosen to price its services differently than most of its competitors. It offers several plans, all of which offer unlimited users, extensions and users. However, none of the plans include any incoming or outgoing minutes. Customers pay $2.00 per month per incoming phone number, plus 2.9 cents per minute for all incoming and outgoing calls (except calls to other extensions on your company’s system, which are free). Incoming toll-free calls are 3.9 cents per minute in the contiguous US.

With most companies offering bundles of minutes, paying by the minute might raise red flags. But OnSIP justifies its policy this way:

“Most competing VoIP providers charge a high fixed fee for each employee in your company on a monthly basis. Generally, that fixed fee includes unlimited calling minutes and use of a fixed set of features. These services range in price from $49.95 per month and up. Seems attractive right? There is a far better option.

With OnSIP, the average user pays a total monthly bill of $18. That’s about $1 per business day per month; a cost savings of at least 65 percent over competitive services. What is this based on? There is no special pricing, discounts or gimmicks factored in. It’s simply a fact that we charge less than every competitor we know of.”

I used this system to make all my long-distance calls for about three weeks, and made about $10 worth of calls. I calculate that my three-person company would probably pay $60-70 per month, which isn’t bad. So maybe OnSIP is right to structure its packages the way it does. But when you do your calculations, make sure to figure in the other charges that you may have to pay for. If you read the fine print from most other companies, they charge for these items, too, but OnSIP is perhaps more upfront about it.

Ordering

The online signup process is straightforward, and allows you to select the features you need. You can port existing phone numbers through the administrative web site for a one-time charge of $57. OnSIP offers a 30-day trial, requires no contracts, and allows upgrades, downgrades and cancellations at any time.

Managing Your Phone System

OnSIP provides two online portals for customers: an administrative site to manage extensions, groups and account data; and a user portal for individual extensions. The administrative site is a bit wonky, and it helps to know some basic Internet telephony terms, but the OnSIP knowledge base includes helpful step-by-step instructions and videos.

Quality and Reliability

As one would hope from a company catering to business, I found the quality and reliability of OnSIP connections to be excellent, even when I was also using my Internet connection for other purposes. I’m told that OnSIP owner Junction Networks is profitable and has been in business for five years, and serves thousands of customers, including some with over 100 users.

As Aliza wrote recently. you’ll want to consider a number of factors when choosing a phone system. For me, call quality, reliability, ease of use and pricing are paramount.

OnSIP will probably appeal to web workers who like flexibility, and are willing to do their own setup. I can also see OnSIP as being a supplement to a landline, which could be used for incoming calls and outgoing local calls. If you want a solution that takes less setting up, and you don’t want to worry about per-minute charges, you may prefer RingCentral. In any case, if you’re considering a business-grade phone system, you’ll want to do the math and see if OnSIP makes sense for you.

Have you tried OnSIP?

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Many web workers are looking at services like Google Voice and 3jam, which allow you to have one business phone number that can be configured to forward to cell phones, to voice mail, or to colleagues if you’re out of the office. Google Voice, however, isn’t really designed for business use, and 3jam has only limited business-oriented features.

If you need more robust features, there are many business-oriented “virtual phone systems.” I’ve recently taken one such product, Grasshopper (formerly GotVMail), for a spin, and was impressed by it. But its cost is higher than Google Voice and 3jam, so you’ll need to see if the feature set is worth it for you.

Grasshopper has quite an extensive feature set; more than I can list here. But some of the most useful are:

• A very slick web interface. Since the system has so many features, it takes a while to find everything, but it’s pretty self-explanatory, and Grasshopper makes good use of tooltips and contextual help to point out and explain features. I found the interface to be a bit slow on occasion, but it’s generally pretty responsive.
• The ability for each company member to have their own extension, with individual greetings, voicemail, web access and notifications by email or text messaging.
• The ability to create “department” extensions that can be forwarded to one or more members of that department. Alternatively, one can create a “call-routing” extension that distributes calls equally across multiple extensions (useful for multi-person sales or support teams).
• The ability to purchase local numbers or toll-free numbers (including “vanity” numbers), as well as to transfer in existing numbers, with minimal setup fees.
• The ability to accept faxes, which can be sent to individual extensions, or to a dedicated fax extension. Faxes can be viewed online, or emailed to you as PDFs.
• The ability to specify your regular business hours, and to route incoming calls differently depending on time of day.
• Control over on-hold music. Grasshopper offers several different types, or you can upload your own (which might include messages as well as music). The default selections aren’t too bad, as hold music goes. You can use different music for each extension, if desired. There doesn’t seem to be a way to turn off hold music entirely, although I imagine that you could upload a blank MP3 file and select that.
• The ability to record your own messages by phone, or to upload MP3 files. Grasshopper will write and record messages for you for $75-$175.

Given Grasshopper’s extensive features, I was surprised that there doesn’t seem to be a way to import contacts into the address book. And it doesn’t have voicemail transcription, like Google Voice and SpinVox do.

I suspect that most web workers will want to look at Grasshopper’s plans and pricing closely. As with most cellphone plans, Grasshopper charges you for incoming minutes. So the $9.95/month “Start” plan, which bundles only 100 minutes per month (with each additional minute billed at 6 cents), will probably not be suitable for most web workers. The “Grow” plan, priced at $49/month, and which is bundled with 2,000 minutes, is probably the minimum that will be useful in a business environment; Grasshopper also offers a more comprehensive plan for $199 a month.

You’ll want to compare Grasshopper with similar services such as Accessline, Virtual PBX, Onebox, RingCentral and others. Plan prices and features vary widely, so you’ll probably be able to find a service that fits your needs and budget. For instance, Accessline (which I’ve used for several years) has a similar service priced at $59.95 per month, but Costco members can get it for $29.95-$34.95. Accessline don’t have all the features that Grasshopper does, and its web interface is pretty clunky by today’s standards. But it has worked well for my company’s needs.

Grasshopper is certainly worth checking out. Its feature set makes it a worthy competitor in a field with many good products.

Have you used Grasshopper? What other virtual phone systems have you used?

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The cost savings can be significant over traditional landline phone services, depending on the needs of your business and whether you make a lot of long-distance or international calls. Here’s a look at the top four ways to cut your web worker budget by using a VoIP service.

Get a business phone number at a fraction of a landline’s cost. Using VoIP can save money on a business line in both service and installation costs. Service for a landline into my home office from our phone company would cost around $30 per month for local service, with long-distance calls additional.

In contrast, VoIP provider Skype offers numbers for pay-as-you-go customers for only $60 per year, plus per-minute usage fees. For infrequent phone users, this is a much cheaper option than a landline. For heavier users, Vonage offers 1,500 minutes of outbound calls to the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico (and unlimited incoming calls), a free dedicated fax line, call waiting, voicemail and caller ID for $39.99 per month.

Installation with VoIP can also save money over a landline if your office is not pre-wired for a phone line. New phone wiring can get extremely expensive, depending on the office location. But VoIP installation can be much cheaper, or even free, depending on your choice of equipment, provider and office Internet connection.

As an added bonus, if you have a lot of business contacts in another area code, you can request a VoIP phone number that will be local for those clients.

Make long-distance calls for free or cheap. Even if you don’t want a VoIP phone number, it can still save you money on long-distance phone calls. Computer-to-computer calls are free using most VoIP services, so if your frequent contacts use a service like Skype or GTalk, you can talk or even video conference with them for free anytime you are both at your computers.

Calling from your computer to a non-international phone number is also extremely affordable with services like Skype, which charges only $0.021 per minute to numbers in the U.S. It’s only slightly higher for Europe or other countries. If you have an iPhone or Windows Mobile phone and a Wi-Fi connection, Skype will also let you place calls from your cell phone. Vonage is also working on an app for smartphones.

Save cell phone minutes on the road. If you keep a minimal minute plan on your cell phone, the usage spike of occasional travel can consume your minutes fast. Using a VoIP service to make calls from the road can keep you under your plan’s limit and avoid cell overage fees being added to your travel budget. I use Skype for lengthy calls home from my hotel in the evenings.

An added bonus is that my autistic 6 year old won’t talk on a regular phone but will when she can see me via a video call.

Video conferencing can reduce the need to travel. Sometimes it is helpful to do business face-to-face, or you need to share visuals during what could otherwise be a phone conference. VoIP services (like GTalk or Skype) can create a face-to-face meeting for free, and allow for the use of visual aids or even screen sharing. And since computer-to-computer calls are usually free, it definitely saves over the price of travel.

Do you use VoIP for business?

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Conferences and events: For most events, using a laptop or phone falls within the boundaries of acceptable behavior. We use our devices to take notes, blog or tweet about the event, and keep up with our email and other work during these events. Possible exceptions to this rule could be where the event is small and intimate, or where most of the attendees are not computer-savvy and so someone typing on a laptop might seem out of place.

Company meetings: In this case, it depends on the company or the situation. In several of the technology companies where I have worked in the past, everyone brought laptops to meetings and used them to take notes or keep up with important emails during the breaks. In some companies, you might find that laptops are only acceptable in meetings where they are absolutely required: Bringing your devices to these meetings would likely be frowned upon. It also is usually inappropriate to bring your devices to very small meetings with only a couple of people.

Client meetings: You should expect to keep your laptop closed and your phone put away during important meetings with clients (you know, those people who pay you to do stuff for them). This was the biggest adjustment for me when I became a freelance consultant. I’d spent years working at technology companies where I could always open the laptop to take notes or add items to my task list. I had to (gasp!) start carrying a pad of paper and a pen to use for my notes during client meetings. Exceptions can be made when you need to show the client something, or if you need to take a lot of notes (first ask if they mind if you take notes on your laptop).

Important meetings: For important meetings with executives, interviews or other critical meetings, play it safe and keep the devices put away. You don’t want to blow a great opportunity by doing something silly.

Social settings: It depends. When I am hanging out with my techie friends, it isn’t unusual for over half of us to be sitting with computers or our phones while also engaging in conversation. However, with other friends, the devices stay put away. In general, take your cues from the other people in the room to decide whether you should be texting or reading email.

These are some of the things that I think about when deciding whether or not to open the laptop or pull my phone out of my pocket. As you can see, there are no hard-and-fast rules, and I have probably made a few mistakes with my own device usage. I like to be connected, and I probably push the limits of acceptable behavior in most cases.

Where do you draw the line between acceptable and rude behavior with your electronic devices?

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Google Voice

Google Voice germinated after Google acquired GrandCentral almost two years ago. The service was relaunched earlier this year as a private beta for GrandCentral users. I’ve been using it for a while, and am generally impressed. Google Voice offers a number of features that should make it popular with web workers.

Incoming Calls and SMS

• You are given one phone number that can be configured to ring multiple places — office, home, cell phone or even an account on the VoIP service Gizmo5. (In the past, users were assigned a new telephone number. Apparently, it will soon be possible to port existing numbers to Google Voice.) Sound quality is quite good, although there can be a delay in transmission, which causes awkward pauses. It’s rather like a better version of talking via satellite.
• If you are not available, voicemails are recorded. They can be transcribed and sent to you by email or SMS. The accuracy of the transcriptions varies, but ranges from fair to excellent.

• You can choose to screen some or all callers, and have them speak their name before the call is forwarded to you. You can set up groups, and allow some callers to bypass screening.
• You can “listen in” on callers as they leave messages, or record calls.
• You can import your contacts through CSV files.

Outgoing Calls and SMS

• You can make outgoing calls through the Google Voice web site. Outgoing calls are free in the continental U.S. International calling rates are quite reasonable, and are competitive with many VoIP services.
• With the Google Voice Add-on for Firefox, you don’t even need to go to the Google Voice web site to make calls. You can just click the add-on and enter a number. And the add-on recognizes phone numbers on web pages and makes them clickable links, too.
• You can also send SMS messages through the Google Voice web site and the Firefox add-on. When you do so, you are assigned a number in area code 406 that allows recipients to reply.

There are a number of other useful features, including conference calling. The complete list is at Google Voice help.

Are you already using Google Voice? Will you sign up once it becomes available?

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Sure, checking-in ticks all the boxes you’d expect: it helps me build client relationships, ensures I don’t miss any project developments I need to know about, and can help with problem solving. But it achieves two other goals that are equally as important, if not more so.

First, it helps remind your client that you’re there. It doesn’t just remind them you’re alive, or that you’re actually doing work. Checking in once a day gives you the opportunity to discuss the sorts of smaller issues that you might not actually set down in email. It gives clients insight into how you work, what thoughts you’re having about different aspects of their projects, and how you might be of value to them in other ways, or on other jobs.

The other benefit of the check-in is that it reminds you that your client is there — that you’re not alone if you face hurdles, need advice or assistance, or want someone to bounce ideas off. I find that working remotely can lead to a sort of “must resolve everything myself” mindset. Whether that means scouring forums for solutions, or brainstorming my own ideas, it doesn’t encourage me to seek advice from the client. And often it’s turned out that, had I asked the client first, the issue would have been resolved much more swiftly, if not more effectively.

A quick IM or call to let the client know where I’m at, or what I’ve been thinking about their project, can often lead to the discussion of factors that I wouldn’t otherwise have gleaned. Last week, while chatting socially with a client about the news headlines, she remembered she’d seen an article that, while not directly related to her company, had a strong bearing on the amount and type of media interest likely to arise around the project I was working on. If I hadn’t called to check in, she might not have thought to mention it to me at all.

But even if every check-in contact doesn’t lead to exciting new discoveries, it usually leaves me with a sense of purpose for my work on the project, and for the day ahead, and makes me feel I’ve reinvested myself with the client — that I’m part of their team, rather than an outsider.

Have you checked in with your client today?

Image by stock.xchng user clix

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The US-based service enables users to capture the audio content of any phone call or conference calls in their entirety for later transcription to text by the service. Users can also markup parts of the call for particular emphasis during the transcription process. Apparently marking up such segments of a call is as simple as hitting a touchtone keypad to issue stop and start commands, though I’m sure a visual aid to this would be a welcome future addition.

Indeed, the service derives its name from ‘cogent ideas’, the parts of conversations that seem to be the most important.

Like reQall, the service is using a combination of speech-to-text technology and human assistance to produce accurate transcripts. However what’s probably more useful than the transcript itself are the implications of a digitized record of audio conversations. All of a sudden, a previously transitory and inert medium becomes searchable, sharable and intrinsically more valuable. Of course there are privacy implications in recording calls, but no more complex than existing issues in retaining phone calls.

At $30/month for 1000 minutes it’s a pricey service, but perhaps the company has inadvertently developed a ‘Gmail for voice’. Regardless, additional price tiers may be neccessary to encourage casual use and wider adoption.

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As an IT teleworker for a large company over the past 10 years, I’ve spent my share of time on conference calls. The other day, in fact, I set a personal record with 11.5 hours of them in a single work day (and I had the sore headphone ear and hoarse voice that came along with that feat). Despite this meeting load, I still had to respond to IM’s, reply to a multitude of emails, prepare slides early in the day for a presentation later on, and a host of other tasks. That begs the question:

How do you effectively multitask in meetings in a way that lets you get work done?

When you can and when you can’t

First, you have to recognize where the multitasking opportunities are. Obviously, when you are presenting a set of slides or walking through some code to an audience, doing anything else is next to impossible. On the other end of the spectrum, if you were invited to provide details that might not even get covered to a broad group, there’s a decent chance you won’t say anything beyond introducing yourself at the top of the meeting.

Pay particular attention to the agenda shown at the beginning of the meeting. If you don’t have a copy of it, take a quick screen shot of it when it flashes by on whatever desktop sharing mechanism you are using if you can, as that will be your roadmap to multitasking potential. Take note not only of the segments where your opinion might possibly come up, but also be sure to mentally check back into the meeting every 2-3 minutes so you can assess where in the agenda things stand. That decreases the chances you’ll be caught off guard by a question when you weren’t paying attention because you were doing something else.

Short Tasks

David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach to task management is ideal for meeting multitasking since it breaks things down into short time segments. In using this method, whenever something comes into your inbox you assess whether or not it is something you need to keep for reference, something you can delete, something you can delegate to someone else, something you can take care of in less than 2 minutes, or something that needs a longer period of your time. Everything except that last category can be processed in the 2-3 minute time slice you create for yourself during portions of your meeting that aren’t as relevant to you as other segments.

Whatever task management tactics you use, there are always quick hitting items that need attention. Taking care of them while on a meeting where you can multitask keeps them from intimidatingly piling up.

Stop and Start Tasks

Some longer tasks lend themselves to being stopped and started in manageable intervals that can match up with those 2-3 minute segments you’ve carved out for yourself while the meeting is going on. Maybe you have some long technical article to read through that lends itself to stopping every few paragraphs to check back in with your teleconference. When a slide presentation needs to be prepared for later in the day, stopping after each slide is done so you can assess how far the meeting has progressed is another example.

Small Physical Tasks

Paper filing, desk cleaning, reloading your beverage if you have a wireless phone — these things are primarily physical rather than mental, and lend themselves to being done while you listen to your meeting. That’s not to say you should go dig the ditch for a new sprinkler line in your back yard while on the phone, but smaller things around the desk are ripe for multitasking.

What to do when you get caught

Make no mistake, if you frequently try to multitask during meetings you will eventually get caught. Someone will ask you a question and, because you were off multitasking, you won’t know what that question was. There are good and bad ways to recover from this situation.

Some will tell you to feign ignorance (“I don’t quite understand what you mean, can you rephrase the question?”). Others will tell you to pass the buck to someone else on the call (“I’m not quite the expert on that topic that Anakin is, what do you think Ani?”) However, the best way is to simply cop to it, but be careful about how you choose your words. There is a big difference between:

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention, can you repeat that?”

and

“I’m afraid you caught me multitasking on something else for a meeting with my boss later today, can you repeat that?”

Both make you look bad, but the latter makes you look less bad. And that’s the risk you run when trying to multitask: the possibility you could look bad on your current meeting weighed against the cost of not getting as many things done throughout your business day. If you approach multitasking opportunities with a plan, though, you can mitigate that risk and be more productive.

Pete Johnson created one of the first web applications ever built inside Hewlett Packard during the mid 1990′s and has had the good fortune to work with over 400 engineers all over the world, write articles for a variety of publications, and present topics at trade shows. He served as the HP.com Chief Architect for two and a half years before a reorganization brought him his present responsibilities as the Marketing and Internet Platform Services IT, Portals and Applications Chief Architect (try fitting that on a business card). He blogs about how improved non-technical skills can accelerate technical careers at http://nerdguru.net.

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The latest place where the devices have surfaced is the Japanese Ceatac exhibition, where Toshiba is showing off a fuel cell-powered cell phone. While the device on display is only a prototype, they expect to release working models by March of next year. This tallies with a report in Fuel Cell Today passing on the news that Toshiba has been investing in a commercial production plant for the devices.

What does this mean for web workers? The obvious is increased device lifetime: Toshiba is talking in terms of a 50% increase in talk time, which would be nice (especially if the technology moves into power-hungry devices like the iPhone). But there’s another consequence that bears thinking about: carrying the supplies for your phone around.

You see, the work that Toshiba (and other manufacturers) are doing right now is primarily centered on direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs). To charge one of these fuel cells up, you squirt in 99% pure methanol; apparently Toshiba is planning to sell this in little plastic bottles. So, your traveling kit may expand to contain little bottles of toxic, flammable liquid, along with chargers and batteries.

One interesting thing to contemplate is taking your fuel cell-powered phone on the plane with you. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has issued rules allowing these devices and up to 2 spare cartridges in carry-on luggage. So you’re covered there – but I personally would allow plenty of extra check-in time. Particularly if you’re an early adopter, the chance is that the TSA screeners might be a bit fuzzy on this rule.

It’s also easy to foresee a whole new group of office accidents. 100ml isn’t a whole lot – a bit less than half a cup – but I’m sure we all know klutzy coworkers who will manage to squirt the bulk of that on their desks, their papers, or themselves. With methanol being a flammable liquid, that has the potential to be no laughing matter. Hopefully the product packaging experts at Toshiba will work out some reasonably safe injection system, but you probably shouldn’t count on tossing the cartridges around with the same abandon that you do with batteries today.

All in all, though, I expect web workers to welcome these devices when they become available in quantity. We already put up with a lot of things to be mobile; having to learn new tricks to deal with a bottle of methanol in our bags should be no big deal.

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