Best Practices for Extension Management

[BobD]

With the mixture of hard / soft phones, there ends up being a large # of extensions and the directory becomes rather overwhelming. For just myself:

Bob Polycom SP IP 330 at Office
Bob 3CX Phone for Windows at Office
Bob 3CX Phone for Windows at Home (Remote)
Bob 3CX Phone for Windows on Laptop
Bob 3CX Phone for iPhone

Q1. Isn't this going to make Dial by Name a mess? How do we "hide" extensions from the dial-by directory?

Q2. What's the best way to handle the 1:Many of Users to Extensions?

Any Best Practices advice on how to setup extensions would be appreciated.

Bob

 

[smb1]

Another way of accomplishing this is using SIP forking where one extension can be registered across multiple phones. In other words, have all those hard and soft phones register as the same extension.

 

[BobD]

How do you configure SIP forking?

The only article I could find on 3CX is:
http://www.3cx.com/PBX/Copyofauto-attendant.html

and that's not helping me any.

Bob

 

[nbailey]

How do you configure SIP forking?

The only article I could find on 3CX is:
http://www.3cx.com/PBX/Copyofauto-attendant.html

and that's not helping me any.

Bob

To use SIP Forking all you do is register the 1 extension to the phones you want. But I am curious, with the list you have it seems you have put an extension in about every location possible. With the 3CXPhone for IPhone, your office phone and a soft phone on your laptop all configured to 1 extensions is a decent amount to be able to reach you almost at any time. In any case, just configure 4 phones with 1 extensions credentials, then when someone calls you all the phones configured will ring until you answer.

 

[BobD]

Yes, I have more phones than are necessary but I'm still kicking the tires on our test system.

When I try to assign two phones with the same extension, I get the popup:

"An extension with the same number already exists. Please chose another extension number[.]"

How do I get 2+ phones to share the same extension # without creating a ring group?

Bob

 

[nbailey]

setting up multiple phones is easy with the same extension, you cannot auto provision the same extension to multiple phones or you get the error you described. What you have to do is manually configure the additional phones through the phones web interface.