RingCentral Office

RingCentral is a surprisingly sophisticated but easy-to?use Web-based VoIP PBX for small businesses. While SMBs may be familiar with on-premise voice-over-IP appliances and individual phones, a Web-based system simplifies the whole thing by letting the phones connect to a remote server over the Internet. RingCentral is our Editor's Choice for hosted VoIP platforms because it includes calling features normally present in enterprise-focused (and expensive!) on-premise PBX systems. With RingCentral, SMBs don't have to deal with server hardware or phone consultants, and gain flexibility without breaking the bank.

Traditionally, IP PBX systems were on-premise boxes, either as an on-site appliance or software that was installed onto a dedicated server. Depending on the VoIP product, this could get complicated pretty quickly, especially if the administrator needed a lot of advanced features or had to support a lot of users on the network. However, this is 2013, and since everything is going to the cloud, why not VoIP?

RingCentral offers IP PBX as a service, so administrators just need to register for an account and configure the features they want right on the Web portal. The system just pushes the settings straight to the phone over the Internet.

I looked at a different cloud VoIP company, Jive Communications, around the same time I was testing RingCentral, and realized that hosted VoIP has come a long way over the past few years. These are robust platforms with many advanced features that used to be out of reach of the smaller customers.

Pricing
RingCentral Office has different pricing levels depending on the number of users that will be using the system. For businesses with 2 to 19 users, RingCentral?costs $29.99 per month per user, but the per-user price can be as low as $19.99 per month per user for businesses with more than 100 users.?Each plan offers necessary toll-free and local numbers, as well fax numbers and conference lines.

RingCentral Office provides both incoming and outgoing phone service which lets businesses set up IP phones as well as route calls to mobile phones and other telephones. There is a more mobile-focused offering, RingCentral Professional, which provides only incoming services, and businesses can just route incoming calls to employee mobile devices. RingCentral also has a fax-only service.

Getting Started is a Snap
Registration for RingCentral is quick, and I received my phone number by email. Businesses can transfer an existing phone number, request a toll-free number, or even get a vanity number. With the phone number in hand, I logged into the Web portal and created extensions, assigned call groups (which I will explain later in the review), defined call queues, set up a call attendant (automated message customers hear when they first call), and did a whole lot of other things, long before I even set up any of the phones. ?Then I created rules for call forwarding, voice mail storage, call routing, and call blocking, among others.

The interface is slick and fairly responsive, but can be a little confusing for first-time administrators. Sometimes I had to click on an option to open the sub-menu, and other times there was a "Next" button. Sometimes the "Next" button took me to the next sub-menu in the sequence, and other times it took me back to the top of the menu tree. Using "Next" or "Back" buttons a bit more consistently would have made it much easier to step through the interface. To be fair, by the time I was configuring my fourth user, I got the hang of the way the interface worked, and found the process easier.

RingCentral helps the small and midsized businesses to navigate the maze of features and options within the interface through Web tutorials and videos. They are all thorough and useful. In fact, I heartily recommend taking a few minutes to go through the tutorials and videos before starting out.

As for phones, RingCentral has an impressive list of IP phones that its infrastructure can support?or you can just buy the pre-configured phones directly from the company. Businesses thinking of switching from on-premise VoIP system to RingCentral may want to use the phones they already have. While that is an option, I think it's worth tossing the older phones on eBay or recycling them, and just buying the pre-configured phones.

These phones have everything set up already, so all I had to do was plug them into the network and power them on. The phones pinged RingCentral's servers, identified themselves, joined my phone network, and obtained all the calling rules I had already defined in the portal. As easy as that, and done in less than 15 minutes (which included the time it took the phones to boot up and reboot).

Everytime I changed settings or options on the portal, the changes were pushed onto the phones, so I knew that the phones were continuously getting the updates.RingCentral sent two phones, the Cisco SPA-525 and Polycom IP-550, for the review. I plugged the phones to my network switch and powered them up. They were standard business phones, so I didn't have to worry about learning how to use the devices.

A Veritable Feast of Features
There are other cloud-based VoIP systems out there, and they have similar setup processes. What sets RingCentral apart from all the competition, however, is the smorgasbord of features the company has crammed into the service. Call auto-attendant (virtual receptionist), music on hold, message alerts, presence information (in office, away, do not disturb), company directory, and directory trees are more or less standard in most modern PBX offerings, whether they are Web-based or on-premise. But RingCentral also offers call forwarding to mobile devices; call groups where a group of phones all ring at the same time; call escalation, where if a user doesn't answer, the system calls the next person on the list and goes up the chain of command; and call queues, where callers wait for "the next available representative" to be available.

Along with a full-blown fax service, the system offers conference call bridge numbers. Users have a unique participant code to use for the conference call bridge number. They offer numbers in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. I had no trouble getting a local area code for my review?Next: Features, Management, Call Quality

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