In This Issue

Message From The President

Along with the current economic rebound General Communications Corporation would like to thank our customers and our dedicated and loyal employees for helping us prevail. We are now very proud to announce that we are expanding.

In 2011 General Communications welcomed the clients of Creative Communications of New Hampshire to our family of esteemed customers.  General Communications in business since 1979 and Creative Communications LLC, in business for 10 years have each grown by providing dependable and personal service to it's New Hampshire and Massachusetts customers. General Communications will continue to provide the trust and excellent service that Creative Communications customers enjoyed over the years. General Communications will continue to build on the many current relationships and will seek to build new relationships within the community by expanding its sales and service operations.

GCC On The Move

In addition to the merger, General Communications has expanded its experienced and dedicated staff.  2010 marked the employment anniversary of Ralph Arico for 25 years of service and Charles Muir with 10 years. This year GCC celebrates Bob Hulsman's 20th anniversary with the company, and Michaela Sterling and Bruce Kamin's anniversary of 30 years. GCC employees average 18 years with the company and are greatly responsible for customer retention and the company's success.

GCC's New Offerings

Our offerings have expanded this past year and this will afford us continued growth in 2011.Throughout our 31-year history, GCC has built its success by searching out only the best new technologies. Added to our portfolio are:

We will be giving free live and web demonstrations for you to learn more about any of these products. To schedule a free session, please contact Brittany at

(781) 756-5100 or bdenaro@generalcom.com.

GCC Appearing At:

GCC sponsored and was represented at the 2011 Financial Technology Insight Summit February 16 and 17 at the Harvard Club in Boston. This event takes a unique look at how technology improves productivity and efficiencies at today's financial institutions.

GCC also was a participant in the largest business expo north of Boston took place at the Crowne Plaza Boston North Shore in Danvers on Tuesday, March 1, 2010 from 8:00am-4:00pm with 100 exhibit booths and over 2,000 business professionals.

 
Attendees will gain a whole new perspective on business in the new millennium with new insight, new ideas, new directions and connections for the future. Meet hundreds of qualified potential customers or clients; examine hundreds of business products and services on display, test products, ask questions and make decisions - right on the spot.

GCC User Support & Participation Workgroups

Last October GCC launched The

First New England ShoreTel User Support & Participation Workgroup. The lunch and learn session was a great success with guest speakers and many current and potential customers in attendance. We will be launching a Tadiran and Toshiba User Group in the next couple months and encourage everyone to sign up early and submit any recommendations for topics they would like addressed.

Sign up for a group here.

The workgroups will provide a conduit for commonality among our customers to participate in technology sharing sessions that compliment the challenges of your business. You will communicate with GCC's sales and support staff, ShoreTel, Toshiba or Tadiran representatives, representatives of other manufacturers that partner with your telephone system and your peers (other similar system GCC Customers).

Who Can Come?
This workgroup welcomes IT managers/directors/administrators, CFOs, CEOs and office managers who want to gain a greater ability to bring best practices to their organization. This workgroup will provide a proven source of information and knowledge. We welcome your support and participation.

Save 10% on Remote Engineering Support & Managed Services

Changes, updates, or repair is less expensive with GCC's Managed Services Remote Support Plan.

How It Works

Customers can plan for their needs in advance by choosing the billable hours they believe they will require for the year and pay for this time on a quarterly basis. If the time needs to be extended or decreased, this can be restructured easily from quarter to quarter to balance out the year. Once this is in place, all you have to do is call us with

your requirements and our technician will log into your system and make the changes. Of course, not everything can be done remotely, so we also have on-site service plans.

If you have questions or would like to sign up, please call Michaela,

(781) 756-5100.

CAN YOU SEE IT? 

The Flexibility of VoIP Gives You The Control To:

• Simplify your office communications
• Improve call handling efficiency
• End phone tag once and for all
• Take internal control of moves adds and changes
• Measure and manage costs
• Grow your business profitable

AND become the ultimate IT Hero - not because you are brave,

              but because you have a Vision.
  

Employees are working harder these days to succeed in winning new business and retaining existing customers. Do you need  better tools and the freedom to work smarter and more efficiently? We can provide you or your staff great ideas before communication problems arise.

Current VoIP application telephony platforms can tie in most of your customer centric  business software  to allow software integrations to be seamless and routine. Whether you are using Salesforce, Sales Logics, Microsoft Outlook/Dynamics, Act,  or any other software capable of sequel query, we can get your technologies holding hands and going in the same direction that your employees need in order to gain credibility and competitiveness. 

Look for signs that your organization can improve by reviewing the following:

1. Are your employees struggling to sustain the internal and external communications needed to keep up with demand? Paramount in maintaining your customer satisfaction with increasing business volume, is the ability for your phone system to make it easy for your employees to effectively handle the increasing number of incoming and outgoing calls. Things to look for: Network congestion, higher than normal call volume, back log of customer orders.  

2. Is your telephone system compatible with other IT/networking equipment you have purchased recently? 

3. Is your phone system able to scale and include additional applications while being cost effective as you grow? Scalability features include such applications as Call Record, Conference Bridge, Video Conferencing, Call Center technology, etc.

4. Is you phone system geared to meet your growth plans? 

5. Is your phone system capable of transporting voice calls seamlessly between branches utilizing an IP network? 

6. Can your phone system email workers when they have new voicemail? 

7. Can your phone system use telephone lines to call out from your branch offices? 

8. Can your phone system help your organization cut costs by using VoIP?    

9. Can you access all of your telecom systems located in branch offices for administrative purposes through one single administration interface? 

10. Can your users remotely control their phones from their desktop or laptop and appear to be working in the central office?  

11. If you plan to open new sites or have multiple locations, can users at all locations see each others presence/status? Can they log into Call Center queue groups remotely?

12. Does your phone system allow your front-line sales executives and sales support staff members that are on-the-move to stay connected and accessible to each other? 

If your answer was "No" to many of these questions, you may need to retire your existing telephone system cabinet and implement a Managed IP Telephony Application that can provide resources that are in high demand and are also compatible with all of your existing applications and technologies.   

Restructuring your communications today will provide you the freedom to stay in control and manage future growth and profitability. For over 32 years our professional staff has successfully guided and managed over 2,000 of our customers' communication installations. To assure the highest service quality and dependability, we back up our security for your system 24/7 with our investment in our helpdesk and company-owned, stocked service vehicles.

Call today to find out how our Managed VoIP Telephony Applications provide the best and latest in quality and trusted communications for your business operations.

"The VoIP, The Whole VoIP and Nothing But The VoIP":

Strategies to Successful VoIP Installation

Adopting VoIP into your organization often results from observing where your organization can realize increasing business value by elevating customer services, improving employee productivity and integrating other business applications within your company. Proper planning and a network assessment will often result in a very satisfactory outcome.

Extremely important to understand is that successful implementation of VoIP depends upon understanding the requirements of your internal network (LAN), the external network (WAN), the bandwidth available for your data needs and voice conversations and last but not in the least is your capability to provide and deliver toll-quality voice over your company's data network.

Although bandwidth cures many problems that can be encountered deploying VoIP it does not allow you to end your assessment here. Correctly estimating the bandwidth required prior to deploying a performance sensitive application such as VoIP, VDI or video conferencing to remote locations is essential to a satisfactory VoIP installation.

Assessment is a key factor in determining the readiness of your company's data network to support a VoIP solution. Network assessments will determine if a data network will deliver sufficient throughput to support a desired maximum number of concurrent VoIP calls. Specifically, the factors that must be measured are latency, jitter and packet loss. Latency is the time delay measured from when a packet is transmitted from its starting point to its destination. Typically, a voice packet's latency must not exceed 100ms in order to achieve toll-quality voice. Jitter is defined as the variation in latency time periods. Excessive jitter can cause voice packets to arrive at their destination in uneven patterns resulting in degraded voice quality. Packet loss is the destruction of a voice packet at some point during its journey to its destination. Packet loss for voice packets must be less than one percent to avoid voice quality degradation.  

In addition to loss, jitter and latency, the  assessment should be include an analysis of the end-to-end data network, measuring bandwidth, utilization, throughput, and MOS. Identify and isolate faults on the network that could inhibit application performance. The final analysis should allow you to determine is this LAN and WAN capable of supporting your voice over IP application? If not, what needs to be upgraded or replaced?  Are the service level agreements functioning per agreements? Is the service level agreement sufficient to handle your existing needs every day and every hour of the day?  What is your maximum call load capability should you be in need to expand in the near future? What is the best and worst call quality given a variety of conditions including time of day? Do not underestimate Murphy showing up without an appointment. Plan failsafe measures such as procuring Redundant bandwidth, pots or SIP trunks/lines as well as a recent backup of critical data. (Murphy's Law - "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong").

Make Sure Your System is Backed Up

General Communications understands the importance of ensuring the integrity of your company's critical telecom database information against file corruption, viruses and other glitches, which can be common in even the most advanced computer systems.  This is why General Communication offers telephone system backups. Your backup is written and stored on CD-Rom, which is located at our office in Woburn, MA. We recommend GCC backing up your system data a minimum of twice per year or at least when substantial modifications have been made to your system. Combined, these backups will provide the redundancy to safeguard your business continuity in case of database loss or corruption. 

Call or email to schedule a backup for your organization today,

(781) 756-5100, service@generalcom.com.

SIP Trunking - Get Past the Science and into the Savings

Now you can realize savings in two ways:

1. Bring SIP Trunks into your existing phone system and save on telephone usage.

2. You will not need to upgrade your existing PBX to a newer version to receive SIP Trunks.

SIP Trunking is made easier and more affordable by integrating traditional voice services (ISDN) with WAN-based SIP Voice connection. This integration method eliminates the need to purchase SIP Trunk licensing and software for your telephone system. SIP Trunking allows for increased capacity and efficiency on the same bandwidth.

How It Works                                                       

The system communicates natively with a service provider over an IP circuit, carrying voice and data simultaneously. Voice is converted to data and sent along with the same circuit as the other data packets. Data gets entire bandwidth when no voice is present. Quality of Service (QoS) is managed by the service provider, with voice taking priority over data.

Since SIP Trunking works over IP networks, it potentially eliminates the cost for separate services like T1, ISDN PRI or multiple analog lines. It also allows businesses to expand their IP reach to remote locations and mobile users. Other key product features and benefits include:    

• Offers ISDN-like features over a data connection
• Eliminates "wasted bandwidth" of unused PRI channels
• Allows bandwidth to be used for data when no voice calls are active
• Can host other services, including IP Stations, SIP Stations, Voicemail and ACD resources

Do More With Less

The purpose of this section is to inform you how many businesses today are using technology to enhance their investment and maximize productivity and customer service. Today almost all of our phone systems are using these state of the art features which are standard options. All the features below can be added onto most current systems. Below is a brief description of some of these options.

• PRESENCE - See the phone status of others in your company. Are they on the phone, away from their desk, working remotely or in a meeting? Knowing the answer speeds the handling of calls, and callers are happier because they spend less time on hold or bouncing around trying to find help. This feature is also used to automatically route personal calls according to your status selection. Status can be changed as easily as a mouse click.

• ADVANCED CALL CONTROL - Use your PC to place, receive, direct and manage calls. With the ability to visually see employees statuses ("Presence") calls are more efficiently handled and directed. Forget about extension numbers and lists, just drag and drop the call onto the person or mailbox you wish to transfer it to.
• MULTIPLE SITE CALL COVERAGE - This feature enables a central attendant to answer calls received by any site in the network. The attendant knows which site to answer the call as, and can transfer the call to anyone in the system.
• CONTACT CALLING/OUTLOOK INTEGRATION - Integrate your Outlook Contacts, company directory and personal directories into one master list that is searchable by first or last name, email, extension or phone number. One click on the contact gives you the option to call, email or send a voicemail.
• SCREEN POP - Incoming calls are now equipped with all the customer information you need. A simple pop up on your screen presents you with the caller's file information so you are informed before even picking up the call.
• ADVANCED MOBILITY - Seamless and streamlined communication between you and the people you do business with- while keeping your location invisible and irrelevant. Get your work done conveniently and efficiently, wherever you may be. On-site and remote users see your presence as available and how to best reach you, and you continue to see others' presence within your company.  Applications include cell phone linking to desk extensions, softphones and mobile twinning. Instant access to directories or Outlook contacts and one-click IM or email links for fast messaging.
• CALL RECORDING - This function has become an inexpensive way to verify orders, assess customer service, train employees and help protect against expensive errors and miscommunications. Recording can be used on an on-demand basis or always-on for every call use.
• CALL CENTER INTEGRATION - Call center software shows callers in queue, longest caller in queue and scrolls supervisor-driven messages. Supervisors are given the ability to "monitor", "whisper" and "barge-in", as well as have access to advanced reporting information.
• INSTANT MESSAGING - Users on the same network can "chat" with one another. This is especially useful to convey an important message to a busy extension.
• CALLER-ID ROUTING - Routes callers to different destinations based on Caller-ID. For instance, certain clients will be forwarded to your cell phone but others will not- this is a completely customizable feature.
• CALL NOTES -Attach a memo to a call record that will be passed to the next caller upon transfer or for your own call history.
• CALL LOGGING AND ACCOUNTING- A detailed record of the last 1,000 incoming, outgoing, missed calls and voicemails made by you, for your review at any time. The record is also exportable.

There's so much more to CTI, so ask your GCC representative for a live or online demonstration today!

Our Services

· Telephone System & Data

· Voice & Data Cabling

· Installation & De-installation Services 

· Relocations, Moves, Adds & Changes

· System Maintenance & Warranty

· Remote Maintenance

· Warranty & Maintenance Repair

· Re-sell Old Equipment

· 24/7 Emergency Service 

· On-site Surveys

· Complete Installation & Training of New Systems

· Complete Programming