Web Worker Daily

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.

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Last weekend, the blogosphere was abuzz with news about GrandCentral, a service we’ve covered before, experienced an outage.  For a few hours on Sunday morning, calls to GrandCentral were not getting relayed to their users and GrandCentral’s website was down as well.

This event should encourage all those of us who work on the web to build redundancy into your web-centric work life.  It’s no secret that our internet and web infrastructures are vulnerable to many threats whether they be man-made or occurrences of nature.  Taking simple measures can help ensure you stay productive and in contact should some part of your work infrastructure go down.

For enterprises, allowing people to work from alternate locations (including home) is conducive to disaster recovery.  In the case of this GrandCentral outage, users of this service should simply give all important contacts an alternate number to reach them in case of GrandCentral being unavailable.
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