I love being out of the office, but for those who want to find me, and are more traditional, letting them think I'm there has become almost an art form for me.
Mostly I use the Locate Me feature of AT&T's CallVantage VoIP service or the mother of all virtual assistants Webley, which is now called Communikate. Of late even Gizmo Project and Skype have added some rudimentary follow me features to their soft phone based services, while PhoneGnome has made enabled real find me/follow me that works with your landline, VoIP service and even softclient that rivals both AT&T and Communikate and costs much less (i.e. it's free). Basically they all do the same thing. They put the calls where I want them to go and then I decide to answer, or not answer, the call.
While AT&T's Locate Me and Communikate both route calls to designated numbers the way you want, CommuniKate has rules and also offers a Start Following Me mode that makes any number I check in from my current number to send calls in real time. Kate also takes voice instructions, much like a faithful and trusted assistant, who rarely talks back unless she (or he) doesn't hear me clearly.
On the horizon is iotum's Relevance Engine. Already available to PhoneGnome and Asterisk users, iotum's developers have taken the elements of relevance (i.e. Artificial Intelligence), context (your appointment book and contact manager) plus your real time status (presence) as set by an IM (instant messaging client) and puts them all together to make sense of out who's calling and if the call needs to reach you. In many ways this is follow me, but maybe find me, maybe not, a state we hope to be in as our lives become more complicated in the always on, always reachable environment that we're really starting to live in.
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