Response Point Team Blog

People ask us for more technical information about Response Point, so we want to remind you about series of documents we think will help:

Deploying Windows SBS with RP

Small Business Server configuration instructions for an optimized Response Point user experience. This technical document is written for the phone system administrator (VAR, SBO, or other employee in charge of the network).

Troubleshooting Guide

Reference this guide for the seven simple system checks before launching troubleshooting technical resources. Use this high-level overview for common issues, causes, and solutions. This technical document is written for the phone system administrator (VAR, SBO, or other employee in charge of the network).

Maintaining RP

Reference for pre-deployment administrator issues, considerations and advice on maintaining Response Point at optimum performance and quality. This technical document is written for the phone system administrator (VAR, SBO, or other employee in charge of the network).

Also please see our documents on Networking Considerations and Networking Requirements.

Ramon Ray, technology evangelist and editor of SmallBizTechnology.com, stopped by our booth today.  Ramon’s been spreading the word about Response Point since the beginning last year, but it was nice for many of us on the team to meet him in person.

One of our favorite announcements at SMBNation is the new book by Harry Brelsford:  Microsoft Response Point Primer: Cut The Strings.  It’s 440 pages of both technical and business information about Response Point, including many pages of tips and tricks that have never been made public before.

If you’re at the expo today, stop by the SMBNation booth and buy it at a discount.

In spite of the rainy Seattle Saturday weather, we have a great turnout here this morning at SMBNation:  lots of show attendees now at our booth, plus about half a dozen Response Point team members.  We have several cool demos set up now, including a very high quality speakerphone from Clearone. 

Harry Brelsford himself dropped by to say hi just before setup.  We hope you’ll come too!

Wow, thanks for the fantastic crowd that showed up at SMBNation last night.  In addition to many of the regular RP fans, we were happy to see so many new faces of people who weren’t yet familiar with all things Response Point.  After a few opening remarks from our general manager, XD Huang, we turned it over to the audience for questions and it was non-stop: you guys aren’t shy!

We covered a range of questions, from the basic (“Does RP support SIP Trunking?” answer: of course) to roadmap questions (“How long till feature X?” answer: no word yet) to business questions about how to sell.  We told people that the three biggest new feature areas we are looking at are: (1) remote extensions, (2) key system functionality, and (3) more.  We want you to ask your questions too!  Please Contact Us.

Harry Brelsford dropped in for a bit.  He’s blogging about SMNation too, so maybe he’ll post some of the photos he took.

Our team is gearing up for a busy weekend at SMBNation, starting with our informal “Open Mike” session tonight.  Meanwhile, Darren Chamberlain, Channel Account Director at our new partner Bandwidth.com wants to invite you to the Bandwidth.com cocktail party on Saturday night at 10:30pm in the Fish Club at the Marriot hotel.

There is a lot of Response Point happening this weekend, so stay tuned to our blog for regular updates.  Or follow us in real time on our new Twitter feed.

If you’re in Seattle for SMBnation this weekend (Oct 3-6), be sure to stop by the Sound Conference Room at the Bell Harbor Conference Center  for our “Open Mike” session from 7 to 8:30pm on Friday night.   Experts from the Response Point team will be on hand to answer your questions, give you inside information about the product, and learn more about you and what you’d like to see from us in the future.

This session is open to the public, so you don’t have to be registered for SMBNation to attend, but if you’ll be dropping by we ask that you fill out this short RSVP so we can keep track of the number of people to expect.

Quintum, one of our new peripheral partners, has been announced as Best of Show winner at the ITEXPO event (held last week in L.A.) in the SMB space for their T1 Gateway solution. Here is some of  the press release as well as a LINK to the article.

"Quintum Technologies, an innovator in VoIP technologies and a subsidiary of Network Equipment Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: NWK), announced today that their new T1/E1/PRI and 4 port FXS Response Point Gateways were awarded the Best of Show, Best SMB Solution, at the Internet Telephony Conference and Expo (ITEXPO) in Los Angeles last week."

Here's an intersting read from ZDNet's John Carrol on Response Point. 

Richard and X.D. briefed him ast week while we were at the ITEXPO show in L.A. His perspecitve comes from a Dev's point of view as well as an-ex Microsoft employee.

Link is HERE.

The great news from last week’s ITExpo keeps pouring in:  two of our new partners (Packet8 and Quintum) have won Best of Show awards.  We made a ton of new high-level telephony industry contacts, thanks to the great reception we had to XD’s keynote (people are still asking us for copies of his presentation).  The traffic to our Response Point web site reflects the new interest, with a nice spike since last week that doesn’t seem to be slowing down. 

We also learned a lot about the industry, from the sessions we were able to attend, including the great Q&A that resulted at the panel discussion we participated in on Thursday morning.  This will come in handy at SMBNation next week, where we’ll be doing more presentations and meeting many IT specialists and resellers targeting the small business space.

As far as I’m concerned, last week’s ITExpo was the best show that Response Point has ever been to and we will definitely be there in Miami next February.

One of our meetings at ITExpo last week was with Andrew Swingler from Crewe Technology in Southern California and who also runs IPPhoneshack.com, an online retail site specializing in Response Point products. Andrew sells a lot of Response Point equipment, and we were surprised to hear that most of his business happens over the phone, without ever setting foot on the customer’s site.

His secret?  He focuses on great customer service, responding to phone inquiries with deep knowledge and unbiased opinions about the products he sells.   Plus, he takes the time to follow up after the sale to ensure every customer is happy.

Sometimes Andrew is unable to make a sale, and we asked him to let us know immediately when there are shortcomings in our products.  We’re a small team and we rely on feedback from people like Andrew to help us improve.

We have a request for Response Point fans out there:  could somebody take a look at the RP entry in Wikipedia and make sure it’s up to date?

The people on the Response Point team are forbidden by Wikipedia ethics to change the page – it’s a conflict of interest – and although I suppose we could log in anonymously and do it, nobody here wants to cheat.  So can we ask a favor of one of our dear readers?

Two changes we’d especially like somebody to make:

• Overall: change to fluent, natural English.  It appears the current version wasn’t written by a native speaker.
• External links: please add the RP blog (i.e. this page!) and suggest people check some of the other links on this page as well.

These are just the two most urgent changes. Of course you’re welcome to add as much as you like, including wholesale copying from anything you find on our official web site.  Steal liberally from the Product Information documents!

We appreciate everything you do to ensure people have accurate Response Point information.

Update (9/23): Thanks to all the people who have helped so far!   Please keep Wikipedia accurate!

One of our new ITSP partners, Packet 8, with their Response Point offering has been announced as Best of Show winner at ITEXPO. Here is a snippet from the press release as well as a LINK to the article.

Here's one of the videos featured in XD's keynote this week at ITExpo: a simple 3-minute introduction to how to set up a Response Point system.

It's easy to link to this video from your own web site.  Click on it to get to the main Soapbox page and just copy the HTML code.

tekVizion Labs™ has been selected to run the Microsoft Response Point Certification Program in addition to the existing Microsoft VoIP interoperability certification programs for Office Communications Server (OCS) and Exchange Unified Messaging (UM) already managed by tekVizion Labs. For more information, please visit the tekVizion site @ www.tekvizionlabs.com

This is good news. It's a sign our Response Point ecosystem is starting to fill out and that Microsoft and new ITSP partners can insure good quality service delivery based on tekVizion's testing plans and methods.