Bluetooth makes life easier

When ESI announced the availability of their Cellular Management product, we were pretty excited around here.  Now that we have had a chance to take it for a spin, we’re still excited!

(If you’re not familiar with ESI, check this out.  And see our web site for more information on ESI products in general.)

In a nutshell, Cellular Management is a way to tame your cell phone while you’re in the office.  If you’re like many people who split their time between working in the office and outside the office (for example, an outside salesperson), you’ve had the experience where you’re in the office and, while you’re talking on your office desk phone, you get interrupted by a call on your cell phone.  It rings in the background, and you lose your concentration and have to either try to ignore the cell call while it rings a few times, or you interrupt your desk phone call to get your cell phone.

Enter Cellular Management.  This is an ESI-exclusive device that works on any ESI Communications Server phone system, and, using Bluetooth technology, allows your cell phone calls to ring on your office phone when you’re within range of your desk phone (about 30 feet).  There are multiple advantages to this approach: (1) You no longer have to juggle cell calls versus office phone calls, because both types of calls now ring to your office phone.  If you are already on a call, the other will come in via Call Waiting, and you can choose whether to take the other call, have the other caller hold via ESI’s exclusive Virtual Answer technology, or have the second caller go to voicemail; (2) You can now do a number of things that you couldn’t do before on a normal cell phone call, like record the conversation, transfer the caller to another phone in the office, easily conference the call, or anything else you could do on your office phone; (3) You can make outbound calls via your cell line by pressing a button on your office phone.  Not only that, but you can even optionally put a button on other office phones to use your cell line, if desired!

This is the device that makes Cellular Management work (it’s called a Cellular Management Access Device, and one is required for each cell phone that will be used):

CMAD using Bluetooth technology

It’s not much to look at, sure, but it’s pretty powerful.  We set up two of these in our office, one for a salesperson and one for a technician, and were pleased with the results.  We installed one near each user’s desk phone and configured each one; we had to decide a few things such as (1) when in the office, if a cell call comes in and it’s not answered, whether it will go to the cell phone voicemail or office phone voicemail (you can choose either option); (2) Whether to have the cell phone sync up automatically when it’s within range, or whether to allow the individual to press a button when he wants for Cellular Management to be active; (3) whether to have incoming cell calls use a distinctive ring (we note that the desk phone display already indicates whether a call is a cell call); and (4) whether to place buttons on other office phones to allow them to access the cell line to make calls (in our case, we opted against this).

The cell phones we used for our testing were a Samsung flip phone and a Motorola Razr phone.  Both had no trouble syncing up with the ESI access device.  Because ESI uses industry-standard Bluetooth technology, it can be used with practically any modern phone with Bluetooth capability (even the least expensive phones on the market are now Bluetooth-enabled), so there is no need to get a different cell phone unless your current one is fairly old.  Bluetooth version 1.2 or 2.0 is supported, but 2.0 is recommended because of higher quality in general.

Both inbound and outbound calls over the cell line using the office phone worked just fine.  We did note that the quality of cell phone calls did not improve to land-line quality merely because we were handling the call on our desktop phone; after all, the call is still taking place in the background over a cellular network, so this is to be expected.  We were thrilled to be able to do all sorts of things with cell calls that we were never able to do before, as ESI phones have a rich feature set.

A couple of extra “bonus” features included by ESI in Cellular Management are (1) The ability to press a button on the desk phone and utilize the cell phone’s “voice dial” (speech recognition) feature to make calls; and (2) When you are on a cell call using the desk phone, if you need to leave the office while you’re in the middle of a conversation (who hasn’t had that happen to them!), you can press a button on the desk phone and have it instantly and seamlessly transferred back to the cell phone so that you can walk out of the office and continue the call.  This is so seamless, in fact, that in most cases the other party won’t even know you’re switching phones, unless you tell them.

Overall, we were very impressed, and can see a lot of useful applications for this technology (for example, as backup lines in the case of problems with your phone company land-lines; or to save money by utilizing your cellular company’s free cell-to-cell minutes for frequent calls to field technicians).  I anticipate that other phone system manufacturers will eventually try to play catch-up in this area, but for now, as in a number of other areas, ESI is a true market leader.

Video on Bluetooth Cellular Management