Productivity & Technology - Grand Central

I have been covering a number of internet tools for the small business. These tools can make you more productive, more responsive or better organized. Lord knows, I could you any and all of these.

Today's tool is GrandCentral.

GrandCentral - recently purchased by Google,
From their website: One Phone Number that rings ALL your phones. Never miss a call you want to take, and never take a call you want to miss. Have one number you keep for life. Choose which of your phones you want to ring, even by group or caller. Screen callers and ListenIn before accepting calls. Protect your privacy by blocking annoying or uninvited callers.
With this system you register an get a local phone number and that can then be used as your single point of phone contact. They currently support over two hundred area codes across the US. Once you have that number you can associate it with one or more personal phone numbers. Now you can change cell phone number, home numbers even business numbers without changing the GC number that everyone already knows for you. When they call, based on your directory the system will either take their message or transfer them to a specific number.

Now this is pretty cool. At this time I am using it for my answering machine and voicemail. Most of the time I don't have it transfer the call, I just drop it into voicemail. As soon as that happens, it sends me an SMS with the phone number. It also emails me with a link to the voice message. For home usage, it makes it easy to set up a phone number that you give to everyone. Then within the system, you forward that to both your home landline (if you still have one of those) and/or your mobile number. This way you NEVER miss a call. Once your directory is populated, you can use it to determine how to direct calls.


This one looks like a winner. It works flawlessly, the voice quality is great and it has a great user interface. I currently am using two different numbers, one for my business and one for our new home. Prior to moving in, we can give everyone our new phone number and I direct it to our current landline, Gizmo SIP number (upcoming blog) and cell phone. Once we move, we can redirect it to a new landline and never miss a beat.