Imagine yourself as the newest hire and on day one, you have no computer, no phone, and an incorrectly spelled email address. It happens. The transition to a new job is already difficult. A poorly planned or executed onboarding process makes it even harder.
New employees should reasonably expect things to be prepared for them on day one, especially devices that are fully set up with the right company configurations and security protocols.
The old model of procuring devices, manually setting each one up, and then providing them to staff is no longer desirable or practical.
With provisioning from vControl, instead of having each purchased device shipped to IT for manual provisioning, it can go straight from the factory or warehouse to the user in their workplace, whether that is an office or their home.
Provisioning might not be a huge deal if you're setting up a single handset. But things get complicated fast when you start getting into setting up a phone system for an entire organisation.
With vControl, you can remotely set up phones across multiple locations in bulk and manage them via an intuitive cloud phone services platform.
Auto provisioning allows for remote configuration of IP phones so you can manage all your devices from a dashboard without ever touching them physically.
The best bit. Provisioning is available to all vControl service providers through our platform. And it's totally free.
When you want to connect a device to the vControl system it takes about 5 minutes, including personalising the settings, e.g. ringtone, time zone, wallpaper – a company logo or a family photo on the screen. Which is fine if you are just doing one phone.
If, as a provider, you are setting up a site with 20 to 100 or even 1000 phones then configuring each one individually would be cumbersome. You would probably make mistakes and it would take days.
vControl's providers clients get a device sent to them that is set up and immediately ready to use after opening the box and plugging it in. No configuration needed.
Using the vControl interface you can set up everything ahead of time via the control panel. Or you can just set up a template for it to auto apply to all phones, so you are effectively only doing it once.
"When someone gets a new phone out of the box and they plug it in, it will automatically download all the settings it is supposed to have and configure itself as say ‘Sally's phone' with all of her personalised preferences on it." explains Ben Merton, vControl's Managing Director.
If you are an IT company and you are supplying a phone service to someone and you want to deploy it, you would do so by provisioning.
"We can also get the supplier who ships out the phones to load the config file on, so the phone is pre-reconfigured and ready to go. We provide config files that can be loaded in via the web interface should you wish to run your own provisioning", says Ben.
Provisioning allows you to manage all the phones en masse and you can do custom configuration per handset.
"For example, a receptionist will need BLF keys for all staff members, but other staff will only want BLF keys for members of their own team, because that's all they transfer calls to. You will be able to do all that customisation."
This also means it's easy for a service provider who gets a phone call from their client saying they want to change the keys because they have a new person starting and want their name on all phones.
"Providers can do that remotely and push changes out to the phone. When that phone restarts and it's good to go!" says Ben.
vControl providers can configure devices before they arrive to their clients, and control how much clients can change or update on their own devices.
It gives them significantly more control than they have had before.
One of the more common IP phone brands sold in Australia has a free provisioning service but it's not great in many respects. Staff change positions, new phones get connected and you have to update every single phone.
"This is one of the biggest annoyances," says Ben. "Once the phones have been provisioned and they need to be changed, you have to go around and update every single phone. If you wanted to insert a new phone at position 2 you would have to manually move all the others down one by retyping their name and retyping their extension number. And if you have 20 or 30 extensions set up per handset you can imagine how frustrating that would be, even using their service."
Via vControl, you can just drag and drop to reorder things. Simple! You can also create templates and copy them across.
"We designed it so it's more user friendly. The provider can do it for them, or the customer can do it for themselves", says Ben.
"We can also do software updates that way. So instead of manually loading firmware onto the phones to upgrade their software you can push it out from our server to the phone so the phone will just restart and have the new updates installed," explains Ben.
And it works anywhere so long as the phone is connected to the internet. It's connected back to the vControl provisioning service so you can just ship a blank phone off somewhere and when it's plugged in, it magically does what it's meant to do!
Being able to provision remote address books is one of vControl's new features.
If you are using a shared address book then it means that when one person updates a record, that change appears on everyone's phone.
"If a client rings in, instead of just showing their telephone number it shows their business name or their actual name. And we can do both remote and local address books, ie shared or private. You can have as many as you like, for example, one for suppliers, one for clients."
vControl have made a web interface in their control panel to manage those address books, so it can be managed by a web page. Much nicer than entering it via the phone handset.
If you're a vControl customer already it's really easy to access this free service via your control panel.
If you're looking for a better service, call our expert team today on 1300 734 235 to find out more about how works and give these new features a try.
© vControl
Terms & Conditions