- So I've got a question for you.
Do you still have a phone on your desk at work?
Now it used to be universal but in many businesses,
specially in the last five years,
the desk phone has become more and more of a rarity.
One reason for this is the universality of mobile phones.
Some companies provide employees with a cellphone
and that's it.
I actually think that this is a trend
that will continue to grow.
However, there is also what's called
Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP.
What this does through a combination
of hardware and software is turn your computer
into a company phone extension.
I personally remember how excited I was
when this first became available
because it suddenly opened up working remotely
as a practical possibility.
It no longer mattered where I was,
people called my extension
and the call came through on my computer.
Callers couldn't even tell that I wasn't at my desk.
And if I wasn't there, well, people left voice messages
which I could listen to later.
The voice over IP software gave me the ability
to see if there were messages waiting,
it gave me history of calls, was able
to use the company's phone directory.
It even let me set up multiple voice greetings
and out of office messages.
And one final thing, it let me forward calls
from my desk phone directly to my cellphone.
Giving me the ability to answer calls
without being near my computer.
As technology continued to improve
and network bandwidth continued to grow,
we moved into what was once considered
science fiction territory.
Video calls, tools like FaceTime
and Skype made video calls normal in the consumer world.
And what was only a matter of time
before enterprise worthy tools hit the scene.
In fact, there's a massive proliferation
of video call and video conference tools available.
From ones that are integrated into large packages
like Skype or Cisco Spark,
to more meeting centric standalone tools
like WebEx or BlueJeans or GoToMeeting.
The best ones now let you change devices
midway through the conversations.
For instance, you can take a call
on your cellphone on the way to your desk
and when you arrive there, the call seamlessly moves over
onto the voice over IP system on your computer.
And then, you jump into a video call
or a screen sharing session from that.
I personally use about three or four different tools
depending on the nature of the conversation
and the technology available at the other end of the call.
But I'll always opt for a video call if available.
We'll talk more about that later in this course.