Call Forwarding on Yealink Phones

[zcsjfisher]

We currently use 3cx and Yealink phones. We also have some older cisco 7940s and 7960s. On the Yealink phones, the "call forward" buttons function like normal, but the settings don't actually change. The only time that forwarding works is if I use the "Status" screens in 3cx. I can set up different forwarding for either Available, Away, DND, Business Trip statuses. However, I can't get this to work from the phone side, only the server side. On the cisco phones, call forwarding works as intended. The soft keys allow me to press "CFWDALL" which is call forward all calls, with that I can set up a call forward all calls to a certain extension that is picked by the user right then and there.

Is there a way to allow the Yealink phones to work like this? I have contacted Yealink and they claim it should work as I want it to, so they pushed me back to asking 3cx about this. Can you shed some light on how I might accomplish this? I have some upset secretaries that would like to be able to forward to a multitude of different numbers at different times so a one-set type of rule doesn't work for me. Also, they might need to do this immediately and don't have access to change the status themselves or have access to changing their own rules. I would prefer to keep them out of the phone system and web UI as much as possible.

I have tried to contact my channel support partner, they don't know how to resolve the issue and also 3cx customer service has also not been able to help. Yealink's customer service pointed me back to 3cx so I am hoping someone else has experienced this and can help me!

 

[GeekSqueak]

This might be counter intuitive but disable the feature key synchronization on the phones. This will allow the call forward to work on Yealink Phones.
Tested: Yealink T20P
3CX Version: 15.5.6354.2

You can find this under the features tab and General Information

 

[VoIPTools]

I would offer the thought that just because you can, doesn't mean you should. I recommend you use presence settings to forward your phones. Yes, it may seem more convenient to do forwarding directly on the phone, but it comes at a cost when trying to track down why calls didn't behave as expected.

 

[GeekSqueak]

@voiptoys To piggyback on what you suggest. Presence status is a powerful tool. If you can get your users to provide you with a couple numbers they will forward to, (eg. cell phone, homephone), you can update their forwarding rules per status per extension in the 3cx software. The really cool part is that the end user can change their status on the fly through their voicmailbox menu. Another cool thing is that the end user can change their status remotely if you have a digital receptionist set up. There are 4 statuses other than available that can be set up.
ATTN: Now there is a Caveat to implementing this if you are going to use office hours/break times on these extensions. The DND status and Away status are used when implementing office hours/break times. If an extension has auto switch enabled it will automatically switch to the DND status when the current time is outside of office hours , it will switch to the Away status when the current time is during break time hours, and it will switch back to the Available status when the current time is in office hours. @zcsjfisher Best of luck to you.

 

[zcsjfisher]

Thanks for the replies! I will try the feature key synch on a couple of test phones. I really do understand the positives of having the presence keys. Our phone system is for a school district and we are frequently needing to change who calls to who randomly throughout the day where setting the presence keys just seem to get in the way of what they want to do.

 

[Yury Rabinovich]

In the Yealink phone portal, under Features >> Forwarding & DND section. The forwarding option has two radio boxes, Phone and Custom. I've had issues when its set to phone (default) and works as expected when set to custom. Log into a phone, change that setting and test it out. If it works, you can change that setting in the template and reprovision your phones with it.