IT/Revelations

PhoneTag Meets GrandCentral – Maybe?

I discovered GrandCentral a little over a year ago when I was doing some testing for a major phone manufacturer. The test phone I was using had a non-local number, so it was difficult to test incoming calls and it confused people when I called them from an out of state number. GrandCentral not only helped me with this problem, it provided several other great benefits (I’ll write more on GrandCentral in another article)

Unfortunately, using GrandCentral meant that there was one more place where people could leave me voicemail messages – one more inbox to manage. I had just recently consolidated all my inboxes by using PhoneTag, so the GrandCentral inbox was very unappealing. Now, according to PhoneTag, it is now possible to use both services at the same time – or is it…

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Foundational Element 3 – Modern Voicemail

Voicemail is probably the least efficient item on today’s buffet of telecommunications offerings. Because my typical day involves many situations where I am not able to answer my telephone, I often found myself spending significant amounts of time listening to and taking notes from voicemail messages. The use of past-tense was intentional – this used to be the case – before I found Simulscribe (now called PhoneTag).

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Foundational Element 2 – Hosted Microsoft Exchange

After you’ve taken sufficient measures to ensure that the e-mail you receive is spam-free, things like push e-mail begin to make more sense. Along with push e-mail, you will have the added benefit of automatic, wireless sync of your calendar, contacts, and tasks when you add Foundational Element #2 to your toolbox – Hosted Microsoft Exchange.

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Foundational Element 1 – Good Spam Filtering

Foundational Element 1 – Good Spam Filtering. Once you are able to accurately eliminate the junk mail, e-mail becomes infinitely more useful. One of my early “IT/Revelations” was that a good spam/virus filtering service would open the doors to new ways to use e-mail.

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Revelation? What’s That About?

Every now and then something comes along that changes the way people live. Sometimes these things creep in as small changes to an existing situation and other times they hit you over the head one day.

I often realize that there are solutions to problems or situations that I usually just take for granted.

My experience with TiVo is a perfect example of this concept.

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