If you are like me and always aways from the phone, you probably have noticed that mobile phones are not a good thing most of the time. You don't WANT to be bothered by the mobile phone when you are in the middle of something. Most mobiles don't have good sound quality. The answering service that you get on a mobile is not very convenient because you can only get the messages back by using the mobile and the person leaving the message must pay premium rates to give you a message plus you are playing premium rates to pick it up again.
Good old land-lines still have their advantages, especially that it is cheap for people to call them.
You can get answering machines for a few hundred dollars which provide the basics but the outgoing message quality is always somewhat poor quality and they are annoying devices to work with -- getting your messages back is linear (you must listen to each message in turn), you sometimes delete the wrong message and if the message is not for you then there is no easy way to make the message "new" again so someone else thinks about listening to it.
So here's the answer -- get a cheap voice-modem and a Linux machine, make a software answering machine that saves messages to hard drive and put a webserver that lets you check your messages from a web browser. Here's a list of features on my implementation:
You will never go back to your regular crappy answering machine again.
Messages can be listened to by anyone in the office, at any time. Supervisors can check the list of editable comments to see at a glance that all messages have been attended to.
I'd like a few more things but the current system is good enough for the moment. In particular:
Here is the source package, it requires some expertise to install because you have to know a bit about apache. I've only tested it with one particular modem so other modems might very likely be different. Also note that most of the paths are hard-coded which is a bit rough but easy to change if you have the source code, if you don't like my choice of paths just search and replace.