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Use Personal Gmail Account or Seperate Gmail for GV and OBi Service with Family

Started by Lewis3000us, October 19, 2014, 11:39:30 AM

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Lewis3000us

I am about to port over to GV and use OBi service.  This will be for our home phone.  Nothing fancy; I just want to simulate telephone service along with voicemail.  And I already understand I need to port to a mobile carrier before porting to GV.

My question is about whether it is best to use my personal Gmail account, or to establish a new Seperate Gmail account only for this GV/OBi use?  In our family we all use our own Gmail accounts for email and other purposes, including on our IOS devices.  My thought right now is that it is better to use a separate gmail account dedicated for this purpose and then have everyone setup with that new account on their iPhones in addition to their main Gmail account.  But my concern with that method is that whenever someone clicks on an email announcing there is a new VM, it will launch the GV app, but they will need to enter seperate credentials for the Gmail account associated with the OBi device.  These credentials will be different from their normal Gmail loging, so I'm worried it will be difficult to manage each login. 

On the other hand, if I use my personal Gmail account, then I will be the only one in the family who will have a single Gmail for both regular use, and for GV/OBi.  And the other fam members will still have the same issue.  So, in this case, I might want to not confuse everyone and just forward the VM to others when the message is for them.  But I don't know if this is possible...

What does everyone else use for solving this issue?  Am I understanding this correctly? 

dircom

A lot of people use a separate account.  You can set up forwarding rules in Gmail, or GV to notify you of messages

Lewis3000us

Thanks dircon.  So good point, I can fwd by rule.  And then when I click on the link in the forwarded email, I assume it will take me to the GV app if I am on my phone.  In that case, will Google allow a different set of saved credentials in GV than for the other Google apps, so that I don't neet to enter it each time?

SteveInWA

The mobile Google Voice and Hangouts apps for iOS can only sign into one Google account at a time, so this is going to be cumbersome for multiple-user, family use.  GV isn't designed to be a multi-user telephone service.  It's primarily an inbound call forwarding system for individual users.  GV uses a companion product (either the old Chat for OBi or the new Hangouts for everything else), as its mobile VoIP calling service.  Chat is also designed to be an individual service for one user.  Remember:  OBi devices are simply accessing one Google account as a Chat user, and any interaction with that phone number has to be from that same Google account.  

Aside from mobile device use, multiple users can't manage VM over the GV telephone interface either. this isn't an issue when just one person is using the telephone interface (dialing your own GV number to listen to messages), but after listening to a message on the phone, it's no longer available for anyone else to listen to over the phone, unless whoever listens to the message remembers to press the option to "save as new".

Bottom line:  OBi devices allow you to use a regular telephone as a Google Chat client, but GV was not designed with this use case in mind, and it doesn't have all the same features and abilities as traditional telephone service.

Taoman

Quote from: SteveInWA on October 19, 2014, 04:06:22 PM

If you forward an email note with a voicemail message in it, the family member who gets it will need to log into the Google account that holds the GV number.


I must be misunderstanding what you are saying here, Steve. Are you saying the person receiving the email with the voice mail link in it would have to be logged into that GV account just to listen to it? That certainly hasn't been my experience. I just now tested it again every which way I could think of and it doesn't matter which Google user I was logged in as the email with the voicemail link in it always worked. I tried using Outlook and the Gmail web interface. I logged into accounts that did and did not also have a Google Voice number/account. It made no difference.

As the ultimate test I pulled out my old iPhone 4 and opened an email that had been forwarded from Google Voice to my Hotmail account. I hit the hot-link to the voice mail and the browser opened up and played the voice mail without issue. I can assure you I was not logged into any Google account on my iPhone.

SteveInWA

Hunh.  Well, then, you made a monkey out of me.  Earlier this year, Google changed the method used to listen to VMs in email notes, and I hadn't tested that scenario.  I guess that the security model assumes that whoever is mailed the note can listen to the message. Thanks for testing, Taoman.

The rest of my comments still apply about the mobile clients, etc. -- it's a cumbersome solution for a family.  You'd have to forward the VMs to one email address (since GV can't forward to multiple addresses at once), and then create rules to forward it on to subsequent addresses of family members.  Also, if this is a typical sitcom family of 4, teen-age daughter probably wouldn't want brother or sister or mom or dad or whoever can sign into the forwarding email account to be able to listen to her VMs.

Probably a moot point anyhow, since most people under the age of 30 don't talk on the phone any more   ::)

Taoman

Quote from: Lewis3000us on October 19, 2014, 12:25:20 PM
And then when I click on the link in the forwarded email, I assume it will take me to the GV app if I am on my phone. 

No, that won't happen. When you click on the link in the forwarded email it will open your browser, connect and play the voice mail. In this particular case credentials aren't an issue. If you look at the actual URL of the voice mail message it is a secure link well over 100 characters in length.

Lewis3000us

I'll just try it with a special gmail account only for this purpose.  And I'll setup a rule to fwd to my personal email, and can fwd it from there to others.