PC Magazine writes about Response Point

Today's PC Magazine features a nice overview of several Internet Telephony and VOIP products, including Response Point. We met with Oliver Rist, the author, last October in New York to lend him a Syspine demo unit.  He tested it for several months before writing the review, giving him lots of time to bang on the system, and it shows in a very detailed and fair discussion. 

Incidentally, Oliver (like most professionals) doesn't check with us before printing his review, and although he came back to me with a follow-up question or two, this review is entirely his, with no influence from us.  That said, I think he did a great job with the facts, and his critiques about the system are things we've been up-front about.  There are two minor things in the article we should clear up, though.  First (and this really is minor) the article says Response Point comes with its own DHCP server.  Not quite true: we lent Oliver a separate router for his testing, and that was providing the DHCP, not the box itself.  You will need a router and an internet connection too -- we're not that easy! :-)

Second, the summary of "Cons" says that Response Point doesn't integrate with Small Business Server; that's not true, as I pointed out this week.  Oliver's right that you can't automatically populate a list of users from Active Directory, but we think that's something only pretty sophisticated companies will try to do.  On the other hand, using our Response Point Monitoring Tool, you can easily set up remote monitoring and "green-check" emails that can be very helpful to an outside IT shop that might be monitoring the system for you.

Here's what he said about our ease of use:

Hardware installation is amazingly simple, especially when compared with something like the Avaya/Netgear VoIP bundle...Software setup was, in a word, a piece of cake—even easier than RingCentral DigitalLine VoIP service...

And here's what he said about what he calls "the miracle of speech":

Microsoft's Response Point team borrowed this speech technology from its Speech Server developers—and it shows. This is good stuff and way beyond the hit-or-miss, need-to-be-voice-trained solutions we've seen before. On my test system, each handset was equipped with a big blue button in the center of the phone: That's part of the Response Point hardware spec. When you press the button, the system gives you a unique tone after which you can say, for example, "dial Oliver Rist" and the phone will automatically do so.

What's cool about this is that the Response Point box did it right after our basic 15 minute setup—no voice training, no voice recording, nada. Just press and talk. The IP PBX extends that to allow the administrator to configure public responses to specific voice questions like, "What are your hours?" The system recognizes that sentence and defaults to the proper administrator recording. I tried several voice accents but wasn't able to trip it up.

Thanks, Oliver!  We agree!