ShoreTel Version 10+ “Find Me/ Follow Me” Enhancements!

Mobility and Office Extensibility continue to be “must have” feature sets for success in todays hyper competitve market place.   Nobody seems to care if it is after business hours in your time zone.  When a client wants you, they want you now and if you can’t be found, they will find someone else!  ShoreTel has had a range of features to address this requirement since the early on releases.  Features like “Office Anywhere” and “External Assignment” have been the minimum daily adult requirement for ShoreTel mobility from the very early releases and they continue today and they continue with Version 10.   ShoreTel has refined the “find me” functionality in this latest release to include a number of new capabilities including “call screening” and the ability to route a call before the caller hears your Voice Mail greeting!
There is an ever increasing group of knowedge workers and professional staff that spend very little time sitting at a specific desk location.    Sales and IT professionals, for example,  are always on the move and away from their desk.   With ShoreTel 10 we can now route the caller to your “find me” locations before the caller hears a greeting.  Depending on your selected call handling mode, you can route an incoming call directly to your cell phone, with full call screening.  This is not a simple call fowarding feature, it is an intelligent process of routing calls and enabling the recipent to determine the priority of the call and then accept or reject the caller.  If the caller is rejected, they then hear your Voice Mail greeting.  (Make sure you don’t invite them to press 1 to activate “find me” as they have already gone down that path)!
Generally, you would set up your “find me follow me” locations as part of your basic Call Manager setup.    You then associate that process with one of your calling handling modes.  I for one, do not want people hitting “find me” when I am in the office and in my Standard call handlign mode.  When I am out of the office, I might want to offer the caller this option, so I associte this process with that call handling mode.   What about the professional who is never at their desk?  Version 10 has a key new option in the “find me” setup: “enable Find me for incoming calls before playing my greeting”.   Additonally you can elect to send the caller CID and even “Enable Callers Name for find me”.
This last option cause the system to prompt ” the person you are calling requests your name”.   The system records what the caller mutters and then follows the “find me” instructions to locate you at one or two locations.   When your cell phone rings you will hear “this is the ShoreTel Voice Messaging system with a call from”, at which time we will insert the recorded mutterings of the caller for your edification.   Press 1 to accept, 2 to reject or 3 to repeat the caller ID.  If you did not elect this option which many might consider obnoxious and rude, the system will speak the numeric caller ID phoen number unless it is another ShoreTel user from within your system.  In this last case, you would hear the ShoreTel play the record name of that users mailbox.
This is only one of the mobility solutions that ShoreTel offers.   Other features including Mobile Call Manager and External Assignment also prove to be powerful options to keep you intouch and availalbe, regardless of your geographic location.    The following film clip walks you through the process of setting up “find me follow me”.   Enjoy!
Mobility and Office Extensibility continue to be “must have” feature sets for success in todays hyper competitve market place.   Nobody seems to care if it is after business hours in your time zone.  When a client wants you, they want you now and if you can’t be found, they will find someone else!  ShoreTel has had a range of features to address this requirement since the early on releases.  Features like “Office Anywhere” and “External Assignment” have been the minimum daily adult requirement for ShoreTel mobility from the very early releases and they continue today and they continue with Version 10.   ShoreTel has refined the “find me” functionality in this latest release to include a number of new capabilities including “call screening” and the ability to route a call before the caller hears your Voice Mail greeting!
There is an ever increasing group of knowedge workers and professional staff that spend very little time sitting at a specific desk location.    Sales and IT professionals, for example,  are always on the move and away from their desk.   With ShoreTel 10 we can now route the caller to your “find me” locations before the caller hears a greeting.  Depending on your selected call handling mode, you can route an incoming call directly to your cell phone, with full call screening.  This is not a simple call fowarding feature, it is an intelligent process of routing calls and enabling the recipent to determine the priority of the call and then accept or reject the caller.  If the caller is rejected, they then hear your Voice Mail greeting.  (Make sure you don’t invite them to press 1 to activate “find me” as they have already gone down that path)!
Generally, you would set up your “find me follow me” locations as part of your basic Call Manager setup.    You then associate that process with one of your calling handling modes.  I for one, do not want people hitting “find me” when I am in the office and in my Standard call handlign mode.  When I am out of the office, I might want to offer the caller this option, so I associte this process with that call handling mode.   What about the professional who is never at their desk?  Version 10 has a key new option in the “find me” setup: “enable Find me for incoming calls before playing my greeting”.   Additonally you can elect to send the caller CID and even “Enable Callers Name for find me”.
This last option cause the system to prompt ” the person you are calling requests your name”.   The system records what the caller mutters and then follows the “find me” instructions to locate you at one or two locations.   When your cell phone rings you will hear “this is the ShoreTel Voice Messaging system with a call from”, at which time we will insert the recorded mutterings of the caller for your edification.   Press 1 to accept, 2 to reject or 3 to repeat the caller ID.  If you did not elect this option which many might consider obnoxious and rude, the system will speak the numeric caller ID phoen number unless it is another ShoreTel user from within your system.  In this last case, you would hear the ShoreTel play the record name of that users mailbox.
This is only one of the mobility solutions that ShoreTel offers.   Other features including Mobile Call Manager and External Assignment also prove to be powerful options to keep you intouch and availalbe, regardless of your geographic location.    The following film clip walks you through the process of setting up “find me follow me”.  It is part of a four part series on setting up Call Handling Modes.    Enjoy and email your comments and questions to DrVoIP!