Company-wide DND with Custom Greeting?

[Bodach]

Good day to all,

I am currently working on a new deployment of 3cx for a client and they have asked me to produce something that I am not sure how to. I have the company set for an After-hours greeting that transfers to voicemail after a small blurb. They would like to know if there can be an org wide DND that also has a custom greeting.

Example: Lunch in the office -> DND -> Thank you for calling insert random reasons why we can't answer here -> Transfer to voicemail.

They want this separate from the After-hours greeting which we currently have setup.

I tried to make as much sense as I could here, let me know if you need any clarification and thank you in advance for any help.

 

[VoIPTools]

If you are wanting to set all extensions to DND at the same time, the best option is to route all calls to a dummy extension and then set forwarding rules based on the extension's presence status. Set the dummy extension to DND and it routes all calls to the lunchtime IVR, and set the extension to available and it routes to the usual IVR.

However, if you permit direct routing to extensions, then things get way, way more complicated. You would need to set the presence status of each extension, and have their DND forwarding rule route to the desired IVR to play the message and route the call to the general voicemail box.

But if you want voicemails to go to the user's voicemail box rather than a global voicemail box, then things get even uglier. You could have the user's DND forwarding rule route calls to a CFD, and the CFD would know who transferred the call (user's extension). In this case, the CFD could play the "out-to-lunch" prompt, then transfer the call back to the user's voicemail box.

But how do you automatically set all extensions presence status to DND? Well, the only option is to use the 3CX Call Control API. To simplify that step, we do provide a REST API that could set the presence status of all user extensions to DND, and after the meeting set the presence back to Available. But what if their presence was already set to something other than "Available"? Yeah, then you would have to look up the users current status, save it to a database, set their presence to DND, and then later set it back to the original status.

Hummm, this all sounds ugly. Another alternative could be to change the after-hours route to a different IVR, then set the PBX to "closed". Then after the lunch meeting, set the route back to the usual IVR and change the status of the PBX to open. While this is possible using an API, let's face it. You better not forget to reset the PBX state back to open.

Maybe someone else has a better idea, but nothing is coming to my brain at the moment that would be "easy" to set, and revert.

 

[Bodach]

I actually came up with a fairly simple solution shortly after typing this. I created an extension with a voicemail that is used during the day rather than after hours. Then I went into the users in the admin console and just set everyone to DND. This automatically routes the call to the chosen voicemail which is the voicemail I recorded for during business hours.

This allows me to keep my same voicemail for after hours, and a more "we are still here we are just busy" voicemail during working hours. Simply switching everyone to DND means the Ring Group is unavailable and thus transfers to this voicemail.

Thank you very much for your help though!

 

[VoIPTools]

So we were looking at some of the same options. I assumed you would want an automated way of setting all the extensions to DND and back again. It must be a small group

 

[Bodach]

Yea you definitely have the added automation in comparison. For the purposes of testing the function I just went simple. It will be applied to much larger groups in the future, so I will be working on your method now to attempt at the automation.