Get GrandCentral On Your Softphone

Jason Harris — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:00:02 +0000

For mobile workers, it’s hard to beat the freedom and flexibility Internet telephony provides us. One of our favorite web services, GrandCentral, gives you the ability to have one phone number that can ring an assortment of phones including your mobile, landline, office phone, and any other place you’d like to be reached.

Additionally, there are those who embrace the utility of a soft phone. A soft phone is an application that runs on your computer and allows you to send or receive phone calls, normally through a microphone headset. Skype is probably the most well known soft phone, but a competitor of theirs called Gizmo5 (formerly known as Gizmo Project) can be combined with GrandCentral to give you soft phone capabilities.

This Gizmo/GrandCentral combination is made possible because of the two services’ use of SIP, a standard protocol for VoIP communication. Using Gizmo and GrandCentral together will give you absolutely free calling inbound and outbound to your callers, absent of using any cell minutes or using a landline.

Follow this hands-on guide to enable Gizmo5 to be added as a phone in your GrandCentral set up.

First and foremost, you must have a GrandCentral account set up and ready. Secondly, download Gizmo5 from their website and create an account. Gizmo5 is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Nokia Internet tablets.

Now that you have your two accounts on GrandCentral and Gizmo5 set up, it’s time to integrate them. Log in to your GrandCentral account and click on the “Settings” tab. In the Phones group, you can see where you have your various phones that GrandCentral forwards your calls to, according to your preferences. It is here that we will put in our Gizmo5 ‘phone number’ for GrandCentral to use.

To find that Gizmo5 phone number, launch Gizmo 5 and under the Account menu, click on “My Profile”. In this window, shown on the right, you’ll see your SIP phone number. Write down this number, minus the 1 at the beginning and excluding everything after the @ sign.

Now, go back to GrandCentral and click “Add/Edit Number”. In the dropdown, choose Gizmo, type in the SIP number found in Gizmo5, and assign a name of your choosing to the entry. Lastly, click “Save” to commit the change.

Now, whenever you have Gizmo5 running on your computer, you have the ability to recieve phone calls without using your cell minutes or tying up a landline. All voice packets are carried over the Internet from GrandCentral to wherever your logged into Gizmo5 from.

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Get GrandCentral On Your Softphone