In Progress 3CX Night Mode Visual Indication

[datatech1]

Hi Guys,
We have noticed that the 3CX system does not currently have a way of being able to visually see when the phone system is in day or night mode (Office Hours or Out of Office Hours).

This is a huge pain in the backside for all of us who come from a traditional TDM based phone system. We have worked on several traditional (digital and electronic) phone systems over the years and all of them have had this functionality as standard where you are able to program a button on the reception phone (or as many phones as is required) to allow the user to put the system into day or night mode, some system even offer a Day, Day2 and Night mode which can be very handy.

3CX have a very useful feature where you can program the systems office hours so it will automatically go into the night mode when the time is outside of these hours, but sometimes customers need the ability to be able to manually put the system into day or night mode.
Luckily the guys at 3CX have allowed the use of a short code which will allow you to force the system into day or night mode or put the system back into the default auto mode:-

• *641 - force the system to use "In Office Hours"
  *642 - force the system to use "Out of Office Hours"
  *64 - force the system to use "Default Office Hours" (auto mode)

This is great, but there is still no visual indication on the IP Phones to show what mode the system is in.

I recently contacted the support department to see if there was a way of getting the developers to look into this as I have noticed there are lots of forum posts relating to this very frustrating issue and they advised me to post on the 3CX ideas forum and get it up-voted.
I even contacted out account manager at 3CX as well as their CEO (Nick Gelea) and they both advised me to do the same, so this is what I am doing.

I have heard from Nick and he said they may be able to do something on the 3CX client as it may be easier to implement, but I don't think this will suit most people's needs as we really need the phone system to be able to light a button on a phone or change the colour of the button if the phone supports that, so I have come up with a couple of possible ways that the development team could easily implement this on the system so that we can start to sell more systems as direct replacements for their aging TDM systems.

The ways I have come up with to get this working could be as simple as a global extension (say 799) as the older 3CX v14 used to show the system extensions (under System Status > System Extensions).

The global extension number could be programmed to be as follows:-

• Available when the system is in Day Mode (In Office Hours)
  Busy when the system is in Night Mode (Out of Office Hours)

This would then allow us to be able to program that extension on the reception phone (or as many phones as required) and give a clear visual indication of what mode the system is in.

We use the Yealink T46G IP Phones in the office (or will do when we can finally get a visual indication for Day / Night mode) and they will show an extension as green when it is not in use or red when it is busy, we also have some clients who have Cisco VoIP phones and they behave in exactly the same way.

It would be even better if they were able to make the button have the ability of being able to show an extension status and being able to dial a short code to put the system into day or night mode like this guys has managed to do with the Asterisk phone system and a Cisco IP Phone:-
http://forums.kerio.com/t/28825/


I hope many of you will see this post and vote it up as I know there are a lot of us on the forums asking about this feature and requesting that it gets implemented as soon as possible as it would be a very valuable addition to the 3CX system and I am sure it will allow us all to sell more system to customers.

 

[LogitComputer]

+ From Switzerland...
Customer called angry that the opening hours were not accepted from the 3CX but unfortunally, a user (wich is now at home due to COVID-19) made the *642 on friday, but said nobody that they should make *64. I was troubleshooting a couple of minutes until I realized the issue. Would be great if we can see the global status on the Dashboard or some other place. Thank you.

 

[mattbratt]

+100

Had let down a couple of customers to lose this functionality, and to "downgrade" another to competitor product. I would so much prefer to have them all on 3CX, please.

 

[BrenttG]

+1 urgently

 

[mgreen@doctechaz]

+1, would be great.

 

[Larry]

I too completely agree we need this

 

[Jackson Smith]

+1

 

[Nathan_Talbot]

I have another prospective client that wants to migrate phone solutions asap. This is a feature they currently have with another vendor and is a must have for any new system, as this has caused major issues in the past.

Wonder if this will hit the road map sometime soon

 

[Marco Ongaro]

+1

 

[BrenttG]

+1

 

[Tim Bazzinett]

+1
After using Trixbox way back the day, I did like that feature. I have new client requesting something similar too. I don't see why this cannot be done.

 

[BrenttG]

+1

 

[Philipp_1]

+1

 

[[email protected]]

What could greatly facilitate my life as a telephone technician would be that a Call Flow Designer application could retrieve the status of a BLF key on an extension to program redirections based on the status of the key.

 

[liss]

I did not read through the entire thread, but we typically assign the inbound route to a "Day/Night" forwarding extension. you can schedule the extension to "Auto Switch" using specific office hours, and manually set the available away forwarding rules to whatever your Day/Night destinations are.

Then a user on the system can log in via mobile app (you can have multiple configured so its easy to switch), or web app to manually change the status.

This also gives you a visual queue in the form of presence of what "Mode" the system is in.

We have a few clients with many locations so a system wide toggle does not work for us. Each of the inbound routes that need this functionality have a dedicated extension configured this way.

You can take the toggle a step further and program a BLF on a hard phone to change status as well.

Hope this helps!

 

[SkippyJ]

+1 for this feature
I have a client I've moved from a traditional PBX to 3CX and this lack of an night mode / in mode indicator is a pain point for them

 

[willowsv]

+1

We don't use timed switching as we don't have "automatic hours" for people in the office as people mix home/away working. I don't think many businesses do nowadays! We solely switch the system in and out manually depending on if there's people in the office or not.

Even the discontinued NEC SL system we replaced it supported night mode with BLFs and toggles out the box it's annoying that I can't replicate this without taking up two soft keys and having to tell users to faff with their mobiles to see the state (normally what happens if 3 or 4 people are in they will all try to set in office hours unnecessarily or set oooh about 3 times as they are leaving "just in case")

The icing on the cake would be if you could configure a toggle state *633 which switches between in hours and out of hours depending on the current state, I tried to do this with a call flow but you don't appear to be able to modify the state (unless i'm missing something?) and you can't divert a call from Call Flow to the service codes to do it (unless i'm missing something) tying in this with the BLF would solve many problems.

 

[Jim Capron]

I do not know what upvote means or how to upvote something, but if it means that I want to support this feature request (again), I will try to find how to do it. I also do not know what "In Progress" means because this has been "In Progress" for quite a while. I keep hoping that the 3CX developers are doing something about adding 3CX night mode visual indication. Is there an explanation of what "In Progress" means somewhere?

 

[rhickmott]

+1

 

[AWS2P]

it surely means nothing crystal clear for all of us waiting for this one and so much others improvment asked/voted here in IDEAs

 

[Olivier_Livi]

+1