Business customers will be impressed by Orange Pocket Landline according to dealer Jez Harris, who also discusses HSC’s Microsoft Reseller programme
Orange Pocket Landline
Orange this month has made their Orange Pocket Landline service available to the independent dealer channel. Their new service is very similar to the now defunct Mobile Landline service that O2 launched and quickly withdrew at the beginning of 2010.
Orange’s version of Pocket Landline however, is chargeable, whereas O2’s offering was free for O2 customers.
For 15 per month Orange customers can choose a local landline number that will ring through to their Orange mobile phone. Customers can choose any geographic landline number enabling customers in Birmingham, for example, to appear as if they are based in, say, Manchester. Customers can have as many local landline numbers pointing to their Orange mobiles as they like for only 15 per month per landline number chosen. When a user dials a chosen landline number and the call is answered, that person only pays for a local landline call and the Orange customer pays no additional diversion rates, just the flat monthly fee of 15.
Orange will/are offering a fancy back-end web-based administration centre that will allow customers to set up various aspects of the service such as recorded messages on unanswered calls, working hours and changing the end destination number.
For 20 per month Orange customers can have Pocket Landline “One to Many” service that will allow up to five Orange mobiles to take the call from one local landline number.
As well as all the features of the first offering, customers have various options with this service, such as having the fi ve phones ring simultaneously or having them ring in a particular order. When one mobile number answers the call, then all other phones will no longer ring.
For 30 per month Orange customers can have all the benefits of the second option but with the ability to make up to 10 mobile phones ring simultaneously from a local landline number.
The service offered by Orange is no doubt benefi cial to UK businesses as they can now make their businesses look as if they are trading nationally for just a small monthly outlay. When you consider that BT charges in excess of 11 per month for a landline number as well as extortionate connection charges, the Pocket Landline service now available to your customers is really a bit of a no-brainer.
Every little helps
A couple of minor changes this month from Orange: SIM-only connections for new business connections will now receive 30 up-front commission as well as the ongoing revenue, while dealers connecting generic SIM-free kits will now only have 10 deducted from normal commission rates whereas this used to be a 40 deduction.
Poison, anyone?
This week the Chronic Dev Team released a Mac and Windows version of their Greenpois0n software that will ‘jailbreak’ all Apple iOS devices up to version 4.2.1 (the current latest). This is not an unlock solution, however, that is proving to be a somewhat harder task for these very clever guys to accomplish. But Greenpois0n will, once applied to an IOS device, allow the installation of third-party unofficial apps and enables massive customisation of the device by the end user.
Greenpois0n is as simple as it gets – the user simply plugs their turned-off IOS device into a machine running Greenpois0n and follows the on-screen instructions to complete the full jailbreak process, which should only take a couple of minutes. Early indications are that this solution works very well and no noticeable features of the IOS device seem to be detrimentally affected. Simply do a Google search for Greenpois0n and get charging your customers 20 a time for this “service”.
HSC’s ‘cloud’ deal
HSC has finally launched its Microsoft Reseller programme for dealers to resell Microsoft Cloud services. Once signed up via HSC dealers can earn 18 per cent on-going revenue for the first year and six per cent thereafter.
Dealers will be able to offer its customers full Microsoft Exchange services for only 3.36 per user per month, enabling full Exchange email as well as shared calendars, contacts and task lists as well as full integration with compatible mobiles.
For 3.52 per month per user customers can have Microsoft SharePoint Online, making it easier for their users to share information and improve collaboration.
Just 3.02 per month gets users Microsoft Office Live Meeting, enabling multi-party video and audio conferencing with real-time presentations.
And 1.34 per user per month gets the user Microsoft Office Communications Online, which is a fancy business-centric version of Windows Messenger.
Or a customer can get all the above for only 6.71 per user per month. This is a remarkably cheap and efficient way for businesses to ensure they always have the very latest Microsoft products, with Microsoft guaranteeing the ‘up-time’ of their Cloud services with financial compensation if the service fails. Your customers will never need to worry about updating to the latest Office version or applying security updates, as these are all automatically sorted by Microsoft.
The Microsoft Exchange Online service alone is a must for mobile phone dealers to resell to their customers, as you can integrate the Exchange services into most modern smartphones, including the iPhone, Android and Windows 6.5 and Windows Phone 7 devices. This will give the customer full synchronisation of their email, contacts, appointments and tasks. I used to charge in excess of 100 per year for the Microsoft Exchange account service, which cost me 50 per year. I can now (via this service with HSC) offer the customer the service for substantially less than I was buying the service for as a reseller.
