iPhone Finally Ready for the Mobile Enterprise
RingCentral’s iPhone application lets you dial, fax, and voicemail like you’re in the office
A friend of mine who works for a venture capitalist firm in Palo Alto once noticed my iPhone at lunch and said, “the iPhone is nice, and I love iTunes, but I can’t use it because it’s not ready for business.” At the time, he was right. Though an incredible entertainment and communications device, the iPhone lacked certain enterprise features such as business-class e-mail and the ability to integrate to an existing business phone system or PBX. And faxes? Forget it – I’m not nearly patient enough to wait for my 3G connection to load one of my incoming faxes through a traditional web-client.
As both a writer and user of RingCentral’s virtual PBX service, I’m happy to say that the we recently started using the iPhone app from RingCentral with positive results. It finally uses business-phone functionality that we rely on in our office to send data to my beloved iPhone. What this means is that I can virtually “port” my office desktop phone to my iPhone and make calls as if I was in the office – the office number showing as the Caller ID and all. It also means I can go to Dolores Park on a sunny day in San Francisco and make my customer calls while still “in the office.” Not that I would do that, mind you, but it’s nice to have the option. 
On a practical level, the two other really useful features are 1.) the ability to send & read faxes from my iPhone screen and 2.) being able to retrieve my office voicemail visually. Both features combined probably save me about 5 minutes a day, and at 240 working days a year – that’s 20 hours per year! Thanks to the RingCentral engineers – I can now enjoy both guilt-free iTunes and almost 3 more days a year that I can spend doing more useful things – like surfing the web. In Dolores Park. On my iPhone. Not that I would do that.