Best Practice Telephone Book Yealink. Multiple Numbers per Person

[Frank D]

Hi,

at the moment our telephonebook situation is not optimal and I am thinking to change it and would love to learn form your experience.

Status quo:
Our 400 Employees are in a LDAP/AD directory.
We generate an internal telephonebook for the intranet using the AD, as well as an addressbook in Outlook, for emails only (we integrate as an LDAP).
The phones use the telephonebook of 3cx. We have a lot of extensions, which are called "lab 1" or "production xy". About 100 of those. About half of the 400 employees have their own dedicated desk phone and extension.

In the phonebook directory of 3cx, we added the numbers of the people, who don't have their own extension (e.g. Person A is best reacched calling "lab 7" or "lab 9"). 100 have several different numbers, as they work in different rooms. About Most of those unique combinations, not much hope setting up ring-groups for all of them.

Plan:
So I am thinking about setting up an csv addressbook that is regulary created from the AD and can be imported in the phone (Yealink T46G) using the provisioning template. The Yealink addressbook does support multiple numbers for each person, which is quite important for us. If I select an item in the local Yealink phone book, it is asking me which of the multiple numbers to call. This doesn't seems to work for the 3cx phonebook on the Yealink phone, or do I miss something?

We aren't using many softphones yet, but we will soen. Is their a way to import a csv or connect an LDAP to the softphone, too? Our current plan is not to use the phonebook of the softphone and to use Outlook via the plugin instead.

If we were using the exchange connection, would this help? How? Does 3cx in connection with the exchange integration support multiple numbers for each person?

Any feedback and tips appreciated

Frank

 

[CentrexJ]

The phone book that 3CX generates for the desk phones (including Yealink) only has one phone number per entry.

The Yealink phones however do support LDAP phone directories. You could try configuring one phone manually and see how you like it and if you are happy with that performance you can modify your 3CX Yealink template to make the changes to all the desk phones.

You probably want to look at page 73 onwards. This shows how to configure the phone manually and also what entries are required for the template. The earlier pages talk more about setting up an LDAP network which you already have.

http://support.yealink.com/attachmentDo ... V80_60.pdf

 

[Frank D]

Hi lifeline,

thanks for your answer.

The Yealink phones however do support LDAP phone directories. You could try configuring one phone manually and see how you like it and if you are happy with that performance you can modify your 3CX Yealink template to make the changes to all the desk phones.

That is what I am doing.
We did some tweaking to make our telephonebook work properly. I already described the situation, that we have multiple numbers for each person. An additional requirement is, that we have extensions, which are the primary destinations/number for multiple employees. E.g. we have some production facilities with a 3 shift system and 6 people having "production A" as their primary number. The thing is, that when an internal call is made from this phone, the recieving phone (callee) is displaying the first alphabetical match for this number. So instead of displaying an incoming call from "production A", it displayed "Person X". But person X didn't call, his colleague did. Often the first alphabetical match was not the most known person or manager but perhaps "just" a part time employee not many other persons in the organisation recognized by name. To address this we added a blank space " " in front of all the persons lastnames this way the "production A" would be the first hit and the name shown in the callees phone. An alternative would be to just show the number, not the name.

I will let you know about further progress.