Fonality is updating its business phone system to detect when users are tapping away at their keyboards—as well as when, how and where to find them if they’re not. Fonality on March 4 is announcing a major upgrade to its business phone system—the PBXtra 4.0—that promises to sniff employees out and forward calls to their cell phones if it detects that they're not tapping away at their keyboards. PBXtra 4.0's new FindMe feature allows users to stipulate when and how they can be tracked down, based on personal schedules and rules, but it also has new built-in presence detection that can pick up on users' keyboard and mouse activities, routing calls to users' cell phones if all is quiet on their PC. Fonality is the purveyor of a hybrid hosted IP PBX and IP-based calling service that's built on the open-source Asterisk IP PBX. Fonality set out to lower voice call costs for SMBs when it launched its hybrid hosted IP PBX offering and IP-based calling service.

Click here for the story. Fonality is following other telephony vendors that are increasingly implementing find-me-follow-me call-forwarding services, which allow users to receive calls at any location, in the case of find me, or to allow users to be reached at any of several phone numbers, in the case of follow me. The PBXtra upgrade includes FindMe with Boomerang Mobile Integration, a presence detection feature that automatically finds employees on their mobile devices, allowing them to either answer the call or to bounce it to any other extension by just pressing a few keys. A user can also now dial *1 to record a mobile call and store it automatically on the PBXtra server. Fonality CEO Chris Lyman said that the upgrade, which is free to any Fonality customer who pays an annual technical support fee, will be downloaded automatically for more than 4,000 customers, who "won't have to lift a finger." "Our data center takes care of it all," he said. Compare that to Cisco or Avaya, whose technicians show up in trucks with software under their arms to do any point release and charge $150 per hour for the dubious privilege of getting upgraded, Lyman said. It's just another example of why Fonality came into being in the first place, Lyman said, given that its founders were "disgusted at the pricing of the big guys—the Alcatels, the Nortels … the your-mom's-tel's." more>>>