Google Apps Gets Integrated Telephony Features

Let's say you're a Google shop. You run Google everything, including Mail, Chat, Apps, Calendar, and so on. You recently caught wind of unified communications services and how they consolidate a lot of your, well, communications, into one place. Cool, right? A new offering from Voice Mobility lets you integrate those unified communications telephony services into your existing Google Apps set up.This is a great little deal. First, you get your enterprise communication and productivity apps from Google for free or nearly free. Then along comes Voice Mobility and ramps up the usability by offering a ton of integrated communication services. Microsoft Exchange server? Don't need it. Active Directory? Skip it. Office Communications server? Not necessary.

Voice Mobility's UCN Vmerge is integrated with the Google Apps solution suite--including Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Contacts, and Mobile apps--all using the workplace or campus domain. It brings unified communications to complete messaging, collaboration, calendaring and presence functionality.

Enterprise clients want the ability to enable their enterprise voice and fax communications to work seamlessly with Gmail. UCN Vmerge allows full on-premise or hosted enterprise PBX integration with a hosted personalized Gmail service. "By integrating UCN Vmerge with Google Apps, workplace and campus customers have price-effective options for collaboration functionality," said Mike Seeley, Voice Mobility's VP of Global Sales. "No longer are customers forced to utilize expensive on-premise solutions from providers like Microsoft for collaboration functionality." Well said, Mike.

Here's a run down of some of the functions offered:

* Send and receive voice and fax messages from Gmail * Record and deposit voice conversations in Gmail * Manage live calls from the desktop * Click-to-dial internal and external numbers from any Google application * Import Google Contacts into UCN Vmerge for remote access * Utilize least-cost routing available from the enterprise PBX

Not a bad list of features. Granted, it isn't as robust and complete as other offerings on the market. But it's not a bad start. People are still looking to Google to roll out its own services that cover this ground now that Grand Central is part of its offering.