Google Voice for Business: part 1

With the transition that Google is making to all Apps account users, one option is opening up for businesses that has typically always been handled on-site or with their Tel-com provider. I’m talking about voicemail. And with the Apps account transitions, Google Voice might soon see an influx of businesses ditching their old voicemail systems for one that’s in the cloud.

Google Voice has been around for about two years. But before being known as Google Voice, it was known as GrandCentral. Google acquired GrandCentral back in 2007. While the name has changed, the basic premise of the service since its GrandCentral days hasn’t.

The service first allows you to sign up (for free currently) for a new local phone number. Then you can input your existing phone numbers for say your home, office and cell, into the service. Then just give out your Voice number to your contacts. You can setup Voice to do many things from there:
- Ring all your phones at once when someone calls your Voice number
- Ring only certain phones at certain times of the day
- Screen all your incoming calls - this plays the person’s name for you while they’re on hold and you can decide to talk to them or not at the time
- Assign different personalized greetings for different contacts or groups of contacts
- Call out for long distance or international calls through your local phone number for rates probably way cheaper than what you’d pay on a land line or even cell
- And of course the main component for this blog post: voicemail

Now some companies already have some of the bells and whistles that Voice’s voicemail will give you like personalized greetings, email notifications, and even listening to your voicemail messages from your computer. But with a lot of those systems, someone in IT or hired by your company had to spend time setting all that up and getting it to work on your computer. One of the many cool things about Voice is that you can access it from any computer, or any phone, anywhere. IT doesn’t need to install some odd plugin or software, or configure a local server to play nice with your email server. It’s all done automatically.

In my next post, I’ll go over some of the ways on how to make this work for your business and also ways to use Voice without having to change all your business cards and contact everyone in your address book.