In my growing business, I am having an ever greater need to intercommunicate with the co-consultants in my firm. For years I have been a “one man” operation, and as such quickly discovered that all I need was my cell phone. If fact, after Local Number Portably came into effect, I ported my home number to my wife’s cell phone and promptly gutted the house of all telephone wires. For the past few years we have had a landline free lifestyle, so much so that my sever year old daughter looks for the “send” button on grandma’s house phone.

The cell phones that my consultants carry handle about 90% of their communication needs. Being Microsoft Windows Mobile 5/6 devices, these phones sync over the air with our Exchange server giving us access to our tasks, contacts, schedules, and email. Push email from Microsoft has long since surpassed the need for pagers and SMS.

There are however small, but annoying kinks in our communication armor. While cell phones are good connecting person-to-person, they are not the best platform for connecting client-to-office. They lack an innate ability to do features such as call transfer, call parking, automated attendant, and integrated messaging. While there are ways of shoe horning those features into the platform, such jerry rigging never really works as advertised. The most basic of Nortel or Avia phone system can offer these features, but the primary human interface for those systems, the desktop phone has not changed in 20+ years. It’s time for the desktop phone to evolve, but what does it need to do.

First, dialing phone digits is now very passé. 99% of all the calls made in my line of work are made to the same narrow set of numbers, be it clients or vendors. My cell phone (via of Outlook and MS Exchange) has all of those numbers, why should my desktop phone not have them? Better yet, why shouldn’t my desktop phone connect to Exchange and sync that data, just as my current cell phone does? Even better, voice dialing is almost a foregone necessity with your cell phone. Why look up a contact when you can push a button and say “Call Joe Client at work 2 …… yes”.

Next, if the internet has taught us anything it is that a device which does not integrate is worthless. So if my desktop phone is connecting to Exchange for my contacts, why not get my schedule, email, and tasks as well. It’s very handy to be able to look down at my phone and see when my next appointment is. While we may power on and off our desktop computers and/or notebooks, the typical desktop phone is on 24/7/365. Using it as an information screen seems like a perfect task for such a device. RSS feeds, pictures, email notifications can all be sent to that screen. Microsoft is even now playing with there ideal of “side show” the concept that would allow a Vista based computer to use a remote screen to display/run Widgets. While I have yet to see a practical applications of this remote screen technology, I can easily conceive of its use.

And what of Software? To survive, the desktop phone will have to do more than talk, or even sync contacts with Exchange, it will have to be an open platform to allow for third party software development. Need a task/job timer, get it from Handango. Need a program to set your in/out office state, get the free version from Rasco. If you base the phone off a current processor with Windows CE, there is already a ton of apps which could be ported to it. Unlike most Windows Mobile/CE devices, it will most likely stay in one location, so giving it tone of storage space as a shared folder on the network should not be an issue.

Connectivity. We have too many wires already. Make the unit wireless or at least Ethernet connectable, forget this 1,2,3 pair Cat.3 stuff. VOIP is not a passing fad, it is what phone systems will be in 5-10 years, embrace it now. Most phone systems already have SIP compatibility. Remember once it’s on the network with an IP address it doesn’t matter if you get you dial tone from one server and your sync data from another. It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting in a temporary office in Nashville, while your home office is in London, it’s all IP, and it’s all good. With Power over Ethernet the wire needs drop even more and not battery powered gives developers one less thing to worry about.

Finally, give your desktop phone some helpful features, like Bluetooth, a Camera, and descent speaker. While I feel that one-to-one video conferencing is rather silly, a camera could be use for that, or for security at the table top. A Bluetooth headset, is a must have for anyone wanting to have conversation, type, and avoided serious neck injury at the same time. A speaker could steam office music, your MP3 library, or the BBC.

Basically, a current cell phone can do all of this, why not have a current desk phone which can do the same?

To that end, I really feel that there is a market for full sized desk phones running Windows Mobile. The irony here is that my tinny HTC Excalibur (T-Mobile Dash), does almost everything this dream desk-phone would do, it’s just too small. With this being off-the-shelf technology there’s no great leap of development here.

One of the reoccurring themes in my life has been, “The technology exists NOW, so why can’t/aren’t we doing it NOW”. What this means is that there are things we are all doing RIGHT NOW that are inefficient and counterproductive, yet we keep doing them because a.) we’ve always done them that way, and b.) No one has implemented current technology to do it better. What really chaps me about these “inefficient things” is that we do not have to wait for new technologies to fix them, we have all the tech we need now, we just are not using it.

I’m in business, I use a cell phone. As a consultant I use my cell phone all the time, everyday, everywhere. In fact 4 years ago I decided I had had enough and went exclusively cellular, dropping my landline in my business. When the Local Number Portability Act finally forced my small local teleco to give up numbers, I ported my home phone number to my wife’s cell phone, and then literally pulled all of the copper communication wires out of my house.

I’ve been using a MS Mobile cell phone sync with exchange for some time now, and I love it. I had used ActiveSync with my old Ipaq for years to keep track of numbers. When Microsoft got into the phone market, I jumped right in, it seemed dumb to waste my time looking up a number on a PDA just so I could hand dial it into the phone. They then went further and with Windows Mobile 5 AUK2 added over the air syncing with push e-mail. (Yes, I know you could do over the air syncing with exchange before WM5 AUK2, but let’s not cloud the issue).

Now that my operation is growing to have more than a few employees, I have a need to better intercommunicate with them. While our cell phones and Outlook are ideal for talking to clients, talking to each other, doing email, and collaborating schedules, there are just some features which we need.

1. The Auto Attendant effect, i.e. “Thank You for calling the Tabor Consulting Group”, for McKinley press 1, for Aaron press 2,…”
2. Call Passing; I’m on the phone with Client A. I think that Client A could be better served if he talks to Consultant B. With our cell phones it not real easy for me to “pass” Client A to Consultant B.
3. Those silly little things that make being on a phone tolerable for the incoming caller: music on hold, phone tree, etc

Also for as much as I love my cell phone it does have its shortcomings:

1. Battery Life
2. Speaker Phone is so-so
3. For what it’s worth, when I do have to “dial” a phone number it’s not always easy to hit those little buttons.

For what I do, a desk phone and a business phone system are almost irrelevant. While I know that I am on the cutting edge, I can now see a time when the desk phone is going to have to evolve, or get out of the way. But how should the desk phone evolve?

Fortunately, we have current technology that can bring the desk phone into the 21^st century.

Integration, Integration, Integration. If the internet has taught us anything it is that a standalone device is useless. The modern desk phone must integrate with our current operating business lives. But what does integration mean? The most obvious feature is that it must integrate a business’s communication platform, i.e. Microsoft Exchange. My cell phone goes out to get my contacts, email, and calendar, why not my desk phone?