Building an enterprise wide telephone system linking multiple offices is expensive, and often requires that you commit to buying all of your equipment from a single vendor. By using the VirtualPBX in the Virtual Office configuration as an overlay to your existing telephone systems, you can create the functional equivalent of an enterprise telephone system without buying any equipment.

Using the VirtualPBX, you can:

• Create a company wide extension plan, using between 1 and 5 digit extension numbering for your entire business, or key business subunits such as sales. Since the VirtualPBX allows extension numbers of 1..5 digits, you can define the same extensions in your VirtualPBX that you already have defined in each of your offices.
• Create a company wide telephone directory which can be accessed by outside callers via your toll-free 800/888/877 number.
• Dynamically route calls to employees, no matter which office they are working out of.
• Create an ACD call center which spans all of your offices, and in effect, turns your entire company into a call center.

Whenever someone calls they can directly transfer to any extension in the system. If they don't know the extension number of the person that they are calling, they can use the unified company directory provided by the VirtualPBX to transfer the call to that person by name.

In order for the VirtualPBX to ring the phone on each employee's desk, it is necessary that the company have any of the following for each employee:

• POTS (plain old telephone service) analog phone line that rings to the employee's desk.
• Company premises PBX with DID (direct inward dial) allowing calls to ring directly to the employee's desk.
• Company premises PBX with auto-attendant that allows a caller to dial through to the employee's physical extension on their desk.

The VirtualPBX would dial the local office's main number, wait for the auto-attendant to answer, and then dial the employee's extension number. The caller never hears any of this interplay, since they are listening to music-on-hold while waiting for the call transfer to complete.

Since the VirtualPBX never transfers a call without the express command of the extension owner, the caller will never be connected to other voice-mail or answering machines that might be present at the local office. Instead the caller is always transferred to the VirtualPBX voice-mail, insuring that all voice-mail is on a single system, allowing new message paging, and message forwarding between all employees at every office in the company.

To the caller, it appears as though all employees work out of a single office, and are always available. Naturally, extension owners can always mark their extensions as unavailable when they don't want to take calls, and all callers will be routed to the extension's voice-mail.