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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Telephone bill? Hah!
By AA Computers Support
It's not often I review something, but when I do it is because it deserves it. Ooma Office has been a boon for our small business. The call quality is great, the features are awesome, and the cost is even better. Had mine for about 4 months so I feel it is time for a review. It's a long one, but worth it.I'll start with the hardware. It is a very plain jane box that hooks into your modem (preferably) or switch (if you have no other way.) We have it hooked up to our switch. No bigger than a standard modem or switch itself, but looking a lot cooler. It will fit fine in your business's networking room or pile of long lost and forgotten networking pile of wibbly wobbly networking cables, as I'm sure most of us in the small business world have. Setup takes 10 minutes. Just be sure to follow the instructions. You will need the code from the bottom of the unit. Included with the set are 2 Lynx units, which are designed to give you dedicated extensions within your office. We haven't used these because no one around here picks up the phone internally (factory) but plan to in the future. The box itself can handle up to 10 technically, but software-wise the main Ooma box is limited to 6 Lynx last I checked. Updates will come in the future, I'm sure. This means if you have 7 phone lines, each person on a Lynx can have a chat and the 7th can be on the main box of the Ooma itself. Hooking up your old phone system is a breeze, as it's just like plugging it into your standard telephone jacks. The Lynx units can be used within a decent proximity of the main box. Equate it to what your standard router would reach if you're curious about range; if you can receive decent WiFi from your router in X location, your Ooma would probably work there as well.Software and interface is very strong with more features to come! There is no call logging yet, but I have no doubt they are working on it. As Ooma Home already has call logging, all viewable from the website, Ooma Office won't be far behind. You can manage a virtual receptionist, set times that the office is open and have a very strong text to speech system in place. During our business hours, we have one message, and the second the office closes, another message plays with options to leave voicemails... or not. The choice is up to you! You can also loop music during hold, which itself is an expensive feature for most business telephony systems. All of this can be and is managed online, so if you end up on Hawaii's beach and just remembered you forgot to set your office to be closed, you can do that from your smart phone in front of the waves. Another cool feature, and the main feature that sold me on the system was call forwarding, but this is a different kind of call forwarding. I run the support line for my company, and have found that while I'm away picking up supplies, I can't always be at my desk. What the Ooma Office system will allow you to do is forward a call simultaneously to another phone number. In this case, my cell phone. If I'm not able to grab the phone at the office, or I'm away, my cell phone rings and I can start the conversation from my cell phone, even though the dialer dialed the offline line. Invaluable. Voicemails also get converted into WAV files and are emailed to you, so if you're not around the office to get the voicemail, you don't have to physically go back to check them, nor do you have to spend 4 hours calling yourself and dialing 600 special digits and 4 pin codes. Simply play the file from the email from your computer or smart phone and you're good to go. An advantage I've noticed: For some restricted numbers, if you let it go to voicemail, the phone number will show up in the email. Caller ID shows up as Anonymous, but the email shows the full number.Cost and quality. Where do I begin... I was at roughly $80+ a month for my telephone service with no more than basic features and very stern rules I had to follow (thanks, Verizon.) With this, at a mere $20+tax per month per line, you're saving a boat load, but not just $60 a month, oh no. You're saving more. A small side gripe and hopefully a note that will make people review their own plans: If you were sold into the "Free Second Line" with any telephone carrier, please check your bill. Taxes are rampant and not something that everyone checks. As it turns out, the FCC has limits on single line plans the Federal Subscriber Line and Access Recovery Charge to $6.50. The second you get ANOTHER line on the plan, that limit goes out the window, and a bunch of other taxes also lose their limiting regulations. Imagine my shock when I found out that the second phone line, which was free and something I never used, was costing me an extra $25 per month in TAXES ALONE. That would have gone to $45/month when the regular price of the line kicked in. So, gripe aside, please review your bills. On to the reason I mention all this: $19.99 service charge per line from Ooma plus roughly $3.20 cents per line, which puts me at $23.19 a month. If I want to add another line, another $23.19. Another after that? $23.19 more. Suddenly, everything's starting to look like dollar signs. When I moved to Ooma Office, I cut my telephone expenses in half and gained a bunch of features that I would have had to have hired someone else to do (which, instead, allowed me to hire said person to do something ELSE productive in the office.)Call quality is very good, as others have stated. It is worth noting that with this system, you will not have to dial 1 in front of the number, area code first, but with Ooma Home (just in case you consider that over this) you will need to. The dial tone is different and has a nifty jingle as it comes on, simply to be different. We have our system hooked a little caddywompus and it's behind a couple of switches, but even then the system functions and works beautifully. Zero call lag, so none of that "You go first" stuff I'm sure we've all had. Voices are clear as day. Haven't had a dropped call yet.Some things to note: 911 is not going to be perfect, as they don't run on the same infrastructure as normal telephone lines. If you have an emergency, be sure to tell them exactly where you are, if possible. In the event of a blackout, some land lines will stay active because telephone lines get their power elsewhere, and the phones run on those same telephone lines. If your internet goes down, so does your entire phone system. Bigger corporate VoIP systems have fallovers, but I don't believe Oooma office does, as the entire telephone system is run off the Ooma box. ((UPDATE)) So as it turns out, our internet DID go down and so did our phone system (as predicted. We knew the risk before we ever got the Ooma system) but something I did learn was that any calls that go in will STILL be answered by your virtual receptionist, but they will not be able to leave voicemails, as THAT is controlled by the box. Since most of us have smart phones, if you access office.ooma.com from your phone and log in, you will be able to change the message people hear when they call in. This is actually a very nifty perk that I didn't quite expect. I just expected to hear the "DOO DEE DEE! We're sorry, but the phone number you have dialed has been disconnected or has fallen off the face of the Earth. Please hang up and try your call again later." Nope, you still get your initial receptionist, as that goes through Ooma's systems. Good job Ooma! You can (for now) port your current phone numbers over to Ooma Office for free, but that can take 2-4 weeks. It took our system 2 weeks. That meant that we wouldn't have been able to use the Ooma system for 2 weeks. What I did, however, was enable call forwarding from my old land line to my temporary Ooma line and it worked like a charm. Once the port was complete, the switch was seamless as I only had to change 2 settings in the web portal.Overall, I love my system, I love saving money, I love the features, and I love the expandability it offers. I ended up getting an Ooma Home to make a small extension to a home office, and paying only the taxes for the phone service (~$3.20) is a dream.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Great System
By Razzoo
I was forced to quickly change phone systems and had heard of Ooma, but didn't want to test the product with my company. Well after checking reviews and doing some research I jumped in and bought the Ooma Office. I have been very pleased. Consumer Reports tested Ooma Telo for the home and gave it a good grade and most reviews all do the same. I can add to these good reviews.Office is different in that you pay $19.99 per line a month (I needed 3) and then a small local fee for E911 and something else. I use 1 of the lines for FAX and it works great. The clarity is good and it doesn't sound like you are in a tunnel or breaking up constantly. Setup is easy and porting your number (transferring your business number from local carrier AT&T)was fast and easy. The porting is free and if you have multiple numbers to port you must do the secondary numbers first then your main number last. The secondary number I ported took 7 days and my main number took 5 days.Some advice that I learned from doing this switch over.1. Ooma Office does not work with VOIP phones. So don't buy VOIP phones or if you have them it will not work with them. VOIP phones are Internet phones that use a RJ-45 jack instead of the standard phone line RJ-11 jack.2. Don't worry about buying phones with multiple lines. The Ooma system will rout the calls to the proper extensions and it only uses 1 line per phone. So if someone calls your main line and is leaving a message and you pick up the phone to make a call you don't push line 2 or look for an open line. You simply pick up the receiver and Ooma puts you on the open line. If you are on the phone and someone calls you it will beep in and tell you who is calling on the caller ID. You push FLASH on the phone to switch over and answer or it will go to voice mail. So your standard DECT 6 or DECT 6 Plus cordless phones work just fine. Don't go buying expensive multiple line phones. I did and returned them.3. Each extension will need its own phone. You can't buy a phone with multiple handsets and have each handset ring to a different extension. Each phone system with multiple handsets is 1 extension. So you will need a Linx for each phone and different extensions. Some virtual extensions can be made with the Ooma Office, too.Overall I highly recommend the system. I will be buying the home Ooma soon as we will be getting Google Fiber and dropping our landline.That reminds me. Ooma does NOT support most standard home alarm systems. Make sure your home alarm or work alarm system is a cellular based system so the alarm can call out and notify police or fire.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Ooma Office is awesome.
By Josie Wales
Getting ready to relocate so I needed a business phone system that was ready as soon as we hit the ground. Ooma is packed with high quality, easy to use features that are not found anywhere else in this price range, Ooma is a no brainer. Call quality is excellent and when I need support the team at Ooma get's my issues resolved fast. On top of all this we are saving hundreds each month, I could not be happier!
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