XO Communications today announced XO Anywhere, a suite of mobility and roaming features developed for its XO IP Flex customers. The new services are the latest edition to XO’s IP service portfolio, which the national CLEC has been steadily building over the past year.

The feature package includes Simultaneous Ring, Click to Dial, Remote Office, unified messaging features and a Web-based toolbar that lets end-users set their own feature parameters dynamically. XO Anywhere is intended to aid mobile and home workers to be more productive and efficient, and to present a professional look from wherever they are working, said Nic Jackson, director of IP and Converged Services for XO.

“As more workers work from different places, they want to be able to work efficiently and present a professional appearance to customers and clients,” Jackson said. This set of services is also a change for XO because the company is giving new capabilities directly to the end-users of its enterprise customers, allowing them to use the XO Anywhere toolbar to set up their own service parameters, Jackson said.

For example, each end user can determine his or her own Simultaneous Ring setup – which phones to ring, and in what order, or whether to ring multiple phones at one time. The Remote Office feature allows an end user to work from home or on the road but have calls billed to the office account, and have the office Caller ID show up on outgoing calls.

End users enter the number they want to call in a designated place on the toolbar and enter the number from which they are calling as well, Jackson explained. The network then calls the end user’s number and the destination number and bridges the two calls, she said. To the person being called, the call appears to come from the business phone of the caller.

“Often, if you are working from home, you don’t want to make international calls, because they are expensive on a home phone account,” Jackson said. “Also, you may not want your home phone to show up on a Caller ID.”

XO Anywhere enables end users to receive voice mail messages as .wav files in their email box and also to use Click to Dial to reach numbers in an Outlook address book or an email.

“You can highlight a phone number in email and click on it to dial,” Jackson said. “We have allowed people to receive voice mails as email messages for a while, but what is new with this service is that end-users can use the toolbar to make changes on the fly in how they want to do that. They don’t have to work through an administrator.”

The new features are based on Broadsoft servers, deployed in clusters in each XO metro market and on Sonus softswitches, Jackson said. Another advantage to enterprises, she added, is that the new features don’t require any upgrade to customer premises equipment or any capital investment.