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Rating: 2.5/5 (3652 votes cast)

GrandCentral

Revolutionizing the way you talk on the phone.

Summary
It’s no wonder Google purchased Grand Central. This comprehensive program lets you obtain a “number for life,” and integrates your existing phone numbers (home, work, cell, etc.) into one service from which you can manage your calling portfolio. 

The service resembles RingCentral except that, RingCentral is designed to meet the needs of businesses, PBX style.  Grand Central, on the other hand, is specifically designed as a personal call-organizing system.

It allows you to divide incoming calls into four groups: Home, Office, Friends, Other. Further subcategories also exist. Each group can have a specific ring, a specific greeting, can be routed to your current location or can automatically be sent to voicemail. In fact, you can tune the Grand Central “inbox” to the point that an individual caller can be routed to a specific greeting, especially for them.

Grand Central can also act as a virtual voicemail processor. You can tap into incoming messages from the Grand Central interface, from your mobile phone, or from any phone you have integrated into the system. Your mobile interface will read like an inbox.  It will show you the caller ID, the length of the message and will allow you to return the call through either your mobile phone or the Grand Central exchange (to save money). 

With Grand Central you never have to receive calls on any phone that you don’t want to take. The idea is to set rules that will send them to one of your group profiles or to voicemail. Most “find me” features, allow any incoming call to be forwarded to your current location. With Grand Central, you can elect which callers are allowed to “find you.” 

If you’re just getting ready to leave the office when an important call comes in, you can immediately transfer the caller to your cell and head out the door.  If you are not sure you want to speak to a caller, listen in as they leave you a voicemail and connect to them if you want to go ahead and talk. Design custom ringing for special friends or clients – as many as you like. You'll have complete control over your telephone communications.

The versatility built into this system is amazing, and it’s only in its beta stage. Right now GrandCentral is available by invitation only. To obtain an invite, go to: http://www.grandcentral.com/home/reserve. Customer input will be highly important during this phase of testing. The user interface, telephone integration and program design will revolutionize the way we do business and run our personal call centers.

Pros
- Ease of use and adaptability
- Owned by Google, and supported by its technical department
- Currently beta testing, with consumer feedback to fix problems
- Revolutionary features, and trusted favorites
- Manages all phone numbers through one application

Cons
- Pricing unknown
- VoIP currently not available
- Sign up available by invitation only during beta testing

Expense
Right now you can’t pay for a GrandCentral account – it is still in beta. It is unknown when it will come out of beta and what the pricing will look like.

Features
The basic features, (Inbox and Address Book), are interactive to a point of distraction.  But using the options is simple.  From your GrandCentral inbox, you have control over the long list of features, including
- Greetings
- Manage which callers are routed to which number
- Quickly add a contact to your address book
- View recorded information
- Forward voicemail as an email
- Flag messages
- Transfer calls between phones

The best way to get a clear idea about the interactive features is to view a demo.  Watch any of these demos and the components become transparent. You will immediately understand how the features can be contrived to meet your particular needs.

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