Small Business Phone System Updated

Response Point, Microsoft’s small business private branch exchange (PBX) telephone system software, has been updated with a service pack offering small businesses more options to reduce ongoing telecom costs, better network connection and call-handling options, and assorted bug fixes and usability enhancements. Microsoft continues to invest in the product, announcing that the next major version, Response Point 2.0, is planned for early 2010.

More Flexible Connections, Call Handling

Response Point 1.0, first introduced in late 2007 and updated with service pack (SP) 1 in Mar. 2008, received SP2 in Feb. 2009. The latest service pack can be applied to existing Response Point—based hardware from Aastra, D-Link, and Quanta Syspine. Notable improvements in SP2 include the following:

Trunk devices. Besides support for analog phone lines, SP1 added the ability to connect the Response Point base unit to the public telephone network through an Internet connection, a capability called Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking. However, SP1 only supports the relatively new SIPconnect specification maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force. SP2 adds support for protocols other than SIPconnect if providers use proprietary hardware devices located at the customer’s site to connect the Response Point PBX to the telephone network over the Internet. (One such provider is Packet8.net.) SP2 also adds the ability for a Response Point base unit to connect (via a third-party on-premise gateway) to digital trunks such as T1, E1, and PRI, which are more mature technologies than SIP trunks and could be especially interesting to organizations with 20 to 50 users.