Google voice management

[Matthew A. Peskay]

With recent rate changes we are looking at no longer providing cell phones to staff. 

We would love to use google voice as a replacement (we provide all staff with gapps accounts already).  

Is there any way to manage Google Voice numbers via the control panel or a third party tool?   

Anyone...??   Thanks!!

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All my best,

Matthew

[George Sorrells]

Not sure that Google Voice is a good alternative to a cell phone, but that is a different argument.  

I do not know of any way to manage Voice other than turning it off and on via the Panel.  You can't even tell, via the control panel, who has it set up, and who does not.

George

[Stephen Gale]

Google Voice is great, but I agree that it doesn't replace a cell phone.  It would replace a classroom phone, assuming that you are forcing users to login and have the Hangouts extension pushed out to your Staff OU.  This is the direction that I am going with classroom phones and our PBX.

[Stephen Gale]

@ Lisa

We have DID (Direct Inward Dialing) numbers that we are gradually mapping to users accounts.  At the moment we are in the planning phase, but here is basically the way we are looking at it.  Each Teacher has a DID that goes to their classroom.  We presently have about 1/3 of our teaching staff with this setup.  They have headphones with a microphone for placing voice calls.

Rather than replacing our PBX, which is just a switch that recognizes the last 4 digits and maps it to a port on the PBX, we map the number to a teachers Google Voice Account.  When someone calls that person it rings where they have mapped it to.  If they want it to ring on their computer (Hangouts), cellphone and home phone, they can do that. They can even base it on a schedule.  If they want to place a call from their computer, or cell phone using their Google Voice number, all they have to do is use the App.

Google Voice charges $20 per voice number to port it over to a Google Voice, so we are weighing the cost of porting over our numbers vs the cost of a PBX over time, that and the additional bandwidth that it would take to handle all our VOIP.  The only other challenge would be training.

Stephen Gale

Director of Technology

West Grand School District

(970) 364-6196

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 8:57 PM, Stephen Gale <ga...@wgsd.us> wrote:

We have DID (Direct Inward Dialing) numbers that we are gradually mapping to users accounts.  At the moment we are in the planning phase, but here is basically the way we are looking at it.  Each Teacher has a DID that goes to their classroom.  We presently have about 1/3 of our teaching staff with this setup.  They have headphones with a microphone for placing voice calls.

Rather than replacing our PBX, which is just a switch that recognizes the last 4 digits and maps it to a port on the PBX, we map the number to a teachers Google Voice Account.  When someone calls that person it rings where they have mapped it to.  If they want it to ring on their computer (Hangouts), cellphone and home phone, they can do that. They can even base it on a schedule.  If they want to place a call from their computer, or cell phone using their Google Voice number, all they have to do is use the App.

Google Voice charges $20 per voice number to port it over to a Google Voice, so we are weighing the cost of porting over our numbers vs the cost of a PBX over time, that and the additional bandwidth that it would take to handle all our VOIP.  The only other challenge would be training.

Stephen Gale

Director of Technology

West Grand School District

(970) 364-6196

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 8:47 PM, Lisa Fusco <lfu...@moriahschool.org> wrote:

Would you be willing to elaborate on how you are replacing the classroom phone?

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Lisa Fusco
Director of Educational Technology & Innovation

The Moriah School
53 S. Woodland Street
Englewood, NJ  07631
201-567-0208 ext. 325