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Assigning Multiple Extensions on a single IP Phone + Phone Book Grouping

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ptdem

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Hello to everyone.

I am quite new to IP telephony so please bear with me. I have setup a 3CX PBX on a trial basis (ver 15.5.13103.5) for providing IP telephony services to several companies hosted on our premises; and have encountered some issues that I need to know if they are resolvable, in order to determine whether I am proceeding with a full blown 3CX deployment or if I need to be looking somewhere else for a valid solution.

Now first with the background, we are to provide IP Phone services to several subsidiary companies, each company having at least one SIP DiD assigned (currently 8 companies with 1x DiD, to be expanded to 16). Call wise each company is assigned a 4-digit number internal range (i.e Company A is assigned range 11xx, Company B is assigned range 12xx, etc).

There is a need for some users to pick-up, as well as make calls from more than one company. For example, a common receptionist/Operator for Companies A, B, C and D, must be able to pick-up incoming calls from specific external DiD assigned to those companies (i.e +35722123456, +35722345678 etc). That receptionist should also be eligible on placing external calls through Companies A, B, C, D etc (for example when the receptionist is calling back from Company B on behalf of the manager etc).

The customers’ preference is to have cheap multi-line IP based hard Phones (either 2 or 4 lines) for the receptionists, where it will be very easy for them to identify from where the call is originating (i.e Line Button 1 – Company A, Line Button 2 – Company B). This way it will also be easy for the receptionist to make an external call on behalf of a specific Company.

Additionally, there is a need to have a separation between companies concerning the Contact Lists (Phone Book). For example, a user under Company A, should ONLY be able to see relevant Contacts under his own company. Alternatively, they have accepted that it could be acceptable if some sort of Grouping is applied (for example be able to group together contacts by Company)

I was currently provided with two GrandStream GXP1628 and one GXP2140 for testing, which seems to be the customers preferred brand mostly due to the cost as well as BLF expandability (seems though that Yealink would be the better way to go, as these phones are not configured correctly via 3CX autoprovision)


There are however a couple of technical issues as far as 3CX configuration, which I need to know if they can somehow be resolved/addressed in order to proceed with pushing this into production.

1. Auto provisioning of Phones with 3CX does not support more than one (1) account/line. This must be a mixture of XML templates along with the 3CX management console. For the moment from the management console I can only assign one (1) unique extension to an IP Phone. If I try to assign the same phone to another extension, I am not allowed to do that, or I can do it by overriding the existing configured extension. Is there a solution to this?

2. Manual Provisioning. With manual provisioning I can setup two (2) or more accounts on my IP Phone, however this procedure is cumbersome, especially if you manually need to provision and manage 10x 4-Line IP Phones. Any suggestions on how to make life easier here?

3. Phone Book Separation. It seems that 3CX does not support this out of the box. Although I did create separate Groups (Extension Groups) under 3CX Management Console, those groups do not apply in the Phone Book. Optionally I can manually create the groups and assign extensions under them through each IP phone (Local Phone Groups), but this is a management nightmare.

4. Although GrandStream (both GXP1628 and 2140) seem to be supported, it seems that the auto provisioning XML templates are somehow not 100% correct. For starters if I use auto provisioning to assign a specific extension, all Line Keys are assigned to that extension. Also 2-way conferencing (or more) does not seem to be working for me.

5. Is there a tool that can help easily create an XML template for IP Phones, specifically for GrandStream? Currently exporting 22000 lines of configuration (from the Grandstream template) and manually editing them, does not seem like an easy task for me. Any readymade custom templates would be appreciated :D.


Thanks

Pavlos
 
Hi Pavlos,

I have worked on a similar situation for one of our clients. The phonebooks issue is going to be the sticking point here, the only way you will achieve the desired segregation is to either modify the templates to link to an external xml file however this is not supported and will not work for soft phone users. Or to setup a seperate PBX for users of each company and configure bridges between them.

The other requirements are possible using carefully planned groups and good user training and extended Grandstream support is on the horizon. If you can lose the phonebook requirements you might just be able to make this work for you, otherwise I would look elsewhere.

With regard to auto provisioning multiple extensions you can achieve this by modifying the templates but again this is quite a hacky way of doing so and is in no way supported.
 
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Hi Pavlos,

I have worked on a similar situation for one of our clients. The phonebooks issue is going to be the sticking point here, the only way you will achieve the desired segregation is to either modify the templates to link to an external xml file however this is not supported and will not work for soft phone users. Or to setup a seperate PBX for users of each company and configure bridges between them.

The other requirements are possible using carefully planned groups and good user training and extended Grandstream support is on the horizon. If you can lose the phonebook requirements you might just be able to make this work for you, otherwise I would look elsewhere.

With regard to auto provisioning multiple extensions you can achieve this by modifying the templates but again this is quite a hacky way of doing so and is in no way supported.

Hi V and thanks for the update.

Yes the phonebook is an issue here and the lack of support is troubling, especially if you choose to modify templates or use an external XML (this is required and cannot be removed I am afraid ..).

Same goes for the Multiple Extensions issue. If I can't use custom templates without losing support from 3CX, then what is the use of support anyway (i.e if that is the case then better go OpenSource / FreePBX) ? The system I have build so far, as I understand is never going to be supported by 3CX as:
  1. I am currently using custom templates for IP Phones in order to enable multiple extension configuration per Phone (still tuning this as there seems to be some issues). By doing this I am not supported
  2. I am using custom ports for RTP / have modified the LASTEXTPORT parameter (as the range 9000-10xxx is far from efficient in my setup). By modifying this I am also not supported as I have seen in other discussions.
  3. I want to use custom phonebook (one phonebook per company), which as per your indication if I do this with custom methods (External XML etc), I am also not supported.

As per your indication above however in regards to the PhoneBook issue, I can use a supported workaround , by installing multiple PBX systems and configure bridges between them (maybe bridges could be avoided by removing the common receptionist requirement). Therefore my question for this matter is, if I can somehow centrally manage these PBX systems (i.e if there is a Central Management Console from 3CX, or if I need to make one). Because if I need to manage / monitor 8 PBX systems separately then definitely 3CX is out of the picture for this deployment.
 
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