Upgrade column: Enjoy VoIP while you travel

For business travellers, it can be difficult to stay in touch with colleagues back home while crossing time zones and continents. But many of the features of VoIP can simplify your life and keep work-related headaches to a minimum, says Scott Wharton.

It can be hard for many of us to draw a line between where work ends and personal life begins.

With each advance in communications technology, that line blurs even more. Mobile phones allow your boss to reach you in the car or even in the middle of the woods, if the reception is good. BlackBerrys buzz into the wee hours every time a colleague fires off an email.

In airports the world over, you can find rows of business travellers with their heads bent over laptops, emailing and instant-messaging right up until their seat rows are called.

As a business traveller, you have extra work-related headaches to deal with, such as oblivious colleagues calling when you're sound asleep in another hemisphere because they're unaware of the time difference. The problem isn't that there are too many communications devices - the problem is the lack of control travellers feel they have over their work lives.

Enter voice over IP (VoIP). There's a lot more to this technology than cheap phone calls that you make over the internet. There are many ways it can work for you. One example: your company decides to go with a new VoIP-based communications solution. Once activated, you can use your computer to set up all kinds of features that allow you to integrate your work phone with your mobile phone and/or home phone.

Other features can vastly simplify your life, such as simultaneous ring, which allows callers to dial one number and your work, home, and mobile phones (and even the phone in your hotel room) all ring. And once you've got your phones set up to ring at once, you don't have to worry about it anymore - you can do it once and then forget about it.

Another way to avoid overdosing on work in the office is to not set foot there in the first place, at least some of the time. With the remote office features made possible with VoIP, you can work from home or even in another country and have it still appear to colleagues and customers that you're at the office.

The flexibility of VoIP and the variety of applications available makes it an ideal tool for business travellers. Some more appealing features...

International calls are charged directly to your company - so no having to highlight a business call on your mobile phone bill so you can get reimbursed later.

You can have all the features of your desk phone on your other phones, so you can reach colleagues by simply clicking on their phone number or easily set up a conference call.

Voicemails can be sent directly to your email, which means that instead of carrying around a constantly ringing phone (and answering more than a few unimportant calls), you can simply check your email and see who actually left you messages.

Also, how many of us flip open our mobile phones to look up a number in the address book - then switch over to make the call on our desk phones so that the call will appear to come from your office? This isn't a problem when all your phones are integrated.

By taking advantage of some of the simplifying and customisable features that VoIP applications have to offer, you can at least be more in control of your life.

Scott Wharton is vice president of marketing for BroadSoft.