For nearly 35 years, mobile phones have been important business tools, but only recently has the boundary of the enterprise been moved past the demarkation of the PBX and phone company circuit to the very pocket of the employee – something completely not practical in a digital world. This is only practical in an IP world.
Here's part 1 – to describe the legacy world.
Call forward is not the best way to make a mobile phone an enterprise phone.
In a digital world, there were only two ways to deliver a call to a mobile employee that had been aimed at the desk of an employee:
a. call forward all calls to the mobile phone of the employee – this moves the voicemail to the mobile voicemail box, something that many companies will find difficult to allow. In highly regulated industries such as securities or healthcare, passing calls to other insecure voicemail systems cannot be tolerated. Compliance people wouldn't allow it. I used this for a time when I worked at Nortel. It was awful since I couldn't tell whether it was a colleague calling my desk or a customer. Both calls had the same trunk ID, so I could not give preferential service. Users had no information about incoming calls except that there was one to be answered or ignored at that moment.
This service surrendered the call to the PSTN and mobile operator.
b. find me follow me – the enterprise voice mail system delivers a recorded message to the caller, who chooses to engage the FMFM service or goes directly to voicemail. If chosen, the FMFM server calls out to the user's cellphone and if answered, plays a recording of the caller's name (recorded by the caller) and presents options for call disposition. If the called party accepts the call, the FMFM server binds the two calls together and the conversation begins. I had this service, when I worked at 3Com. Useful to keeping voicemail on the enterprise server and preventing me from having to publish my mobile number.
This service delivered an audio message over the PSTN providing the user with a mechanism for control of call dispositions. Classically, total time was generally in the order of thirty seconds or so… that's the time to take the phone out of the pocket, click the accept button, listen to the invitation to participate in the call, and be joined to the call.
In the digital world, the enterprise network ends at the PSTN circuit interface.
