Siltek Telecoms wins distribution of Ringmaster

Siltek Telecoms has recently been appointed as the local distributor for Ringmaster, a messaging system developed by Irish based Softech Telecoms. "One of the challenges of unified messaging is that it gives employees a lot of autonomy because they communicate with anyone, at anytime," says Johann Engelbrecht, national sales manager of Siltek Telecoms.

"This autonomy can lead to problems if a company does not restrict the communication activities of its employees to relevant and productive purposes." "If messages are not monitored, employees could be partaking in activities which are not in the companies best interest, " he continues. The Ringmaster system resides on a server that is connected to the data network and the private branch exchange (PABX). It keeps a log of all the voice, fax, e-mail and Internet traffic and compiles reports on the duration and cost of calls, as well as details of fax traffic and Internet usage.

Ringmaster enables companies to establish the source, destination and volume of e-mail and faxes that originate from different servers to provide a single point of reference from which a person can listen to a message, redirect it or broadcast it to a group. "An individual can have an email read to him by a synthesised voice," mentions Engelbrecht. "The system will tell him if the message is short or long and give the option to press a key to stop reading; and if it doesn't know a word, it will spell it. It can also access a cellular phone to alert someone that there is a message waiting."

When it comes to voice calls, instead of a client being handled by automatic voice response and getting caught up in an endless loop in trying to get hold of someone, calls are handled by a human operator whose PC is linked to the network, explains Engelbrecht.