Andriod and interest in the 700 MHz wireless spectrum may be generating the majority of recent press about Google’s future telephony plans. But GrandCentral, the VoIP online product that Google purchased in July 2007, shows this strategy in action.
Upfront, GrandCentral doesn’t have the small business features (such as toll-free numbers, multiple extensions, and faxing) that you’ll find with RingCentral. Still, after testing the GrandCentral beta, I found more than enough benefits to justify business people taking a look.
Put simply, GrandCentral gives you a single local phone number (which are available for most areas of the United States). At this point, you easily define which of up to six phones (and one temporary number) ring based on who’s calling your main number. One advantage is as you change service providers or jobs, you just update GrandCentral set-tings; your GrandCentral number never changes and users are transparently routed to any of your new phone numbers.
GrandCentral’s other features – including voicemail, call recording, and notifications – then help you mange your communications from one spot.
The heart of GrandCentral, which is operated from a simple Web interface, is the Address Book. Unfortunately, the beta won’t currently let you import contact lists (Outlook, Out-look Express, CVS, vCard, Yahoo, and Gmail should be supported at some point). But once I manually added a contact, GrandCentral routed calls from that person (as detected by Caller ID) to any device I specified or to voicemail. These options are easily changed on the fly – but rules can’t be created based on the time or day as you find with RingCentral. Still, GrandCentral has enough flexibility to, say, automatically forward a call from an important client to your cell phone if you’re away from the office. Additionally, I recorded a custom greeting for each person. Besides e-mail and SMS notifications of voicemail, the Address Book has an Inbox showing messages from that person. From here it’s especially easy to return the call, forward to an e-mail address, and reply using e-mail. In an early look at how this system integrates with other Google technologies, I clicked the Map tab to see the caller’s location using Google Maps. Optionally, you view messages from everyone on the main Inbox page.
To accommodate wholesale routing changes, I placed contacts into one of four available groups (friends, family, work, and others). You then select which phone rings for each group. However, there’s currently no option to add custom groups.
GrandCentral’s ListenIn feature, which is controlled from your physical phone, gives you several answering machine features. For instance, I heard what people had to say before picking up the call and listened to voicemails as they were recorded. Also, I blocked un-wanted callers from ever reaching me.
CallSwitch is a neat feature that let me change phones in the middle of a call; for in-stance, I switched from cell phone to landline and the caller wasn’t even aware of the change.
Finally, there’s Visual voicemail, which works on just about any mobile phone with a Web browser. Sorry, but this implementation doesn’t look elegant next to the iPhone’s feature of the same name.
Still, I enjoyed access to GrandCentral messages and other basic settings from my cell phone without the need to install any client software.
GrandCentral is clearly a work-in-progress. Google won’t publically discuss its plans for the product – though based on the beta I doubt they’ll add many more features for an initial launch.
Yet it does solve a fundamental business problem: simplifying communications for managers and other mobile professionals. As such, there’s enough here to merit considering GrandCentral once it’s in general release.
Availability: Private beta that requires invitation from current tester to join.
Pricing: Free for light use; cost for paid features to be announced.
Verdict: GrandCentral reaches you through a single phone number, yet lets you answer the call using up to six devices. The system offers voicemail, which is accessed by phone, e-mail, or online. You customize greetings for each user – and decide what to do when re-ceiving a call from that person. GrandCentral notifies you of messages using e-mail or SMS. And basic functions can be performed from a cell phone with Web browsing capability.