The last few years have seen a dramatic change in the capabilities of telephone systems . Sometimes referred to as a private branch exchange (pbx)or a private analogue branch exchange (pabx).

It was not so long ago that they were purely voice systems. They connected to the Public Switched Telephone Network (pstn), a national network that linked to global networks that supported voice.

Today's phone systems support voice, data and fax and are able to combine voice and data information into a single database.

To give an example of the benefit to businesses of this; a telephone call coming into a business with a modern system will be able to recognize the callers telephone number and will use this number to launch a software application such as a contact management system like Goldmine or a customer relationship management system such as Microsoft CRM linking to financial application such as Sage.

Systems of this type may sometimes be referred to as converged systems or IP Telephony systems.

Another capability of "phone systems" such as these is that all types of messages, e-mail, voice mail and fax appear in the mail inbox of the users personal computer. This means that users do not have to go to one >system for voice mail and another for a fax.

Furthermore a system of this type will provide security from external attack when the system is connected to the Internet.

It will do this because it incorporates a firewall. Also such systems can provide free telephone calls between a companies different locations using a process known as voice over Internet protocol ( voip ). This is where a private IP network is used to support voice calls as well as data traffic.

Managing and using a system that integrates both voice and data into a single box solution is far simpler than many of the seperate boxes that would be typically used to make up a similar solution.

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