40 Midlands companies attended a free-half day seminar on the secrets of stress-free business communications hosted by telecoms firm Armstrong Bell in conjunction with industry giant NEC.

The event, held at the Hilton Birmingham Bromsgrove Hotel, offered business owner-managers, SMEs and corporate facilities managers the opportunity to learn about everything from everything from cloud computing to implementing an effective disaster recovery plan and even 'ethical hacking' to check data security.

William Copley, director of Armstrong Bell, said: "Technology has the power to make doing business much easier, whether it's the basics of an office phone or IT system that 'just works' with no hassle, or remote working from the other side of the world and having everything you need at your fingertips. But we've also all experienced the times when technology doesn't work - it's incredibly frustrating for staff and customers, and costs a business time and money in lost productivity. That's why NEC's famous reliability is so important to our portfolio of products.

"Our seminar explained some of the issues firms should be thinking about when it comes to building a strong and effective telecommunications backbone for their business, as well as demonstrating the latest kit, ranging from basic call logging and more advanced MyCalls call centre packages for managing individual's performance through to call recording and the more advanced Unified Communications for Business (UCB) software. The feedback from our delegates was that we'd provided them some genuinely useful advice they can take away and actually use in their firms."

A prize draw was also held for delegates, with Peter Jessop from History Direct winning an Apple iPad and Cressida Darby from Medical Imaging receiving a Ricoh CX2 digital camera.