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Christmas shipping and opening times 2012

This table shows our Christmas shipping times for our standard UK deliveries via APC:

Order Date Delivery Date
20th December 21st December
21st December 3rd January *
2nd January (Back to normal)     3rd January

Please note deliveries to Scotland will not be delivered until Thursday 3rd January 2013 (Due to Scottish bank holidays).

* If you would like goods to be delivered on Christmas Eve, APC can provide this service at the standard timed delivery surcharges:

pre 9am delivery: Add £12
pre 10am delivery: Add £10
pre 12pm delivery: Add £5

We work very hard with our couriers to ensure punctual delivery, but unfortunately as we all know the bad weather can sometimes affect our normal everyday workings especially at this time of the year. So please accept our advance apologises if there are any delays caused by bad weather.

ProVu Christmas Opening times:

Dates Opening times
24th DEC OPEN 09:00 – 14:00
25th DEC – 26th DEC CLOSED
27th DEC – 28th DEC     OPEN (Skeleton staffing) 10:00 – 16:00    
29th DEC – 30th DEC CLOSED
31st DEC OPEN (Skeleton staffing) 10:00 – 16:00
1st JAN CLOSED
2nd JAN Back to normal 09:00 – 17:30

ProVu celebrate 10 years of snom distribution

10 years of snom distribution

Yes it is hard to believe, but it is now 10 years since ProVu supplied their first snom phone. Back in 2002 when England had just lost again to a fluky Ronaldinho goal in the Japanese World cup and Broadband was just becoming widely available with speeds of just 256K ProVu reached agreement with snom to become their first UK Distributor.

Even in those days it was clear that VoIP was going to represent a major challenge to the long established traditional communication methods of ISDN and analogue lines. And with the advent of affordable Broadband and the SIP voice protocol it was clear that businesses were going to want to take advantage of the flexibility to call colleagues and customers anywhere in the world using the same Internet connection that they were using for normal business data.

The first snom model to be sold by ProVu was the snom 100 (view the snom 100 datasheet) which had an elegant designed handset. This also had the habit of elegantly sliding off the cradle with the slightest of knocks or vibrations to the table. snom quickly moved on to the snom 190 and 200 which set the standard for SIP phones with their ability to be provisioned automatically and technically superior SIP stack.

Ten years on snom have moved from strength to strength, with a wide range of phones and ancillary equipment that is still considered at the cutting edge of internet telephony.

ProVu are delighted and proud to have been snom’s UK Distributor for over 10 years now and look forward to achieving even greater success over the coming years.

Very secure Yealink provisioning coming soon

Just a quick note to say that I was supplied a specially modified version of a Yealink T28P a few weeks ago which has HTTPS certificates loaded into it.

There are two certificate chains, one is used by the provisioning server to verify the identity of the phone. The other is used by the phone to verify the identity of the server. There is a list of a few popular certificate signing authorities you can buy a certificate from for the server identity.

This two way identification is what is required for a truely secure provisioning system. It protects against attackers attempting to obtain SIP configuration from our servers and protects against DNS spoofing/poisoning attacks against your phones.

We sometimes get asked for HTTPS provisioning and of course it is pretty simple to implement. But without these certificates it is fairly useless. It does nothing to guarantee the identity of the server or the client.

At the moment this is a Beta test, we will be rolling out this provisioning option as soon as we can, in the next few weeks. It requires Yealink to start supplying phones with certificates pre-loaded at the factory and requires a certain (currently test-only) firmware version.

If any of this is of interest, please let us know.

Prosys Firmware upgrade

Just a quick note to draw attention to new features we have added into ProSys for Snom firmware upgrades.

Prosys is our online toolkit for ITSPs to manage SIP phones

The features are:

– automatic handling of multi step upgrades
– Support for Snom 720 and Snom 760 phones.
– Support for a different target version for a version 7 Snom and a version 8 Snom.
– Different counters and times of day for version 8 and version 7. (for counted and overnight upgrades)

As seasoned Snom users will know, sometimes upgrades are multiphase. You have to do one upgrade then another in turn. This has always been something that ProSys has just handled but did you know it can upgrade a phone all the way from version 4 to version 8 ? And do the bootloader along the way.

So why the different settings for version 7 and version 8? Snom are now shipping phones with version 8 firmware as standard. Many ITSPs have large installed bases of phones in 7.3.30. Some customers have been upgraded their own phones to version 8.something. (Where something might be a early beta)

So the outcome is to leave all the version 7 phones untouched, but makesure any phone which is on version 8 is upgraded to the best stable version.

In the long term, all phones will get upgraded, but in the meantime service providers don’t want poor early v8 firmware reflecting on badly on their service.

We don’t want to change all these phones instantly during working hours. This is where an overnight counted upgrade comes in. We set a counter for each service provider; say 10 phones. Each night we reset the counter back to 10 so that 10 phones upgrade each night.

This way any problems can be discovered and rectified for a few users.

In summary, we can leave your version 7 phones untouched, but roll up version 8 phones to a version of your choice.

If the above is of interest, please get in touch.

The end of pricing.provu.co.uk

We are going to switch off pricing.provu.co.uk on 22 of February.

Instead we ask people use the Price list in Prosys. This has all the same features and more.

While the old site has worked for many years, it isn’t keeping pace with our changing business. Many of our customers now get slightly better pricing because they are parts of Manufacturer schemes such as Snom SCE. Prosys is aware of these whereas the old pricing.provu.co.uk doesn’t.

We want to put an end to any confusion. We also will run one secure site for all price information.

If you are a reseller but don’t have log in details for ProSys yet, please contact us on 01484 840048.

ProVu Christmas Shipping!!

Order Date Delivery Date
21st December 22nd December
22nd December 3rd January
23rd December onwards 4th January
3rd January (Back to normal)     4th January

If you are in need of a special delivery throughout the holiday period we may be able to arrange a service; surcharges will apply. Please contact a member of our sales team to discuss possible options on 01484 840048.

We work very hard with our couriers to ensure punctual delivery, but unfortunately as we all know the bad weather can sometimes affect our normal everyday workings especially at this time of the year. So please accept our advance apologises if there are any delays caused by bad weather.

ProVu Christmas Opening times:

  • Fri 23rd: 9:00-14:00
  • Sat 24th – Tues 27th: Closed
  • Weds 28th – Fri 30th: Open (Skeleton staffing) 10:00 – 16:00
  • Sat 31st – Mon 2nd: Closed
  • Tues 3rd: Resume normal working hours 9:00 – 17:30

Automatic Redirection and Configuration

Just to clarify,

If you order a phone with provisioning server redirection from ProVu, then this service is fully automatic.
We just setup the profiles you require and our servers do the rest.

This means:

  1. We are happy to offer redirection or configuration, even on a single phone order
  2. Once we have setup a profile for your company, this happens automatically on any order. Nobody has to remember to do it
  3. We can do your shipments very quickly – we don’t open any boxes.
  4. We don’t do any copy and pasting or such time consuming. Nothing to mess up.

This isn’t new. Our systems have been fully automatic since 2005.

We are happy to provide phone redirection.

But you might also like to look at our hosted service prosys phone management system.

Call Wait Times

ProVu have setup some call handling statistics on our own PBX. We’ve helped resellers install many such systems, but not actually pointed the technology at ourselves before.

The results are that the average waiting time to talk to a human at ProVu is 5.1 Seconds.

And the Longest anybody has waited to talk to a human is 9 seconds.

So, ring 01484 840048 and you can be sure you will be talking to a real human within 9 seconds, even in the worst case.

We think our call answering times are just another of the ProVu special advantages.