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Concept Question on Extensions

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petewatterschats

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I am looking to see if my understanding of extensions is correct.

It looks to me that an extension connects a person to a phone. Even though that person has a VOIP Phone, PC Sodtphone, Smart Phone soft phone, tablet soft phone the same extension applies to them all.

When you install a VOIP Phone and softphone they will all be assigned to the same extension

Am I correct
 
If that is what you want. When someone picks up a phone and dials an extension number, then all devices, that are assigned that number, and are registered at the time, should ring.

In an office environment, it make sense that one extension number always reaches one person, or one desk, one room, etc.
If you were using 3CX, in a home environment, where anyone, anywhere in the house, might pick up an incoming call, then you might consider putting all sets into a ring group. Then an incoming call will ring alls sets as it would on a call to a sales department where the caller did not specify one particular individual.

Each set could still be called individually.
 
leejor said:
If that is what you want. When someone picks up a phone and dials an extension number, then all devices, that are assigned that number, and are registered

I think this is key. There are no "persons" in 3cx. There are just extensions. As an extension has a status, an email-address and a call history, it does make sense, to use the the extension as a person.

But sometimes an extension will be used for something else, like a room.

When we started, I wanted to provide every employee with it's own extension, even those, which were sharing a phone with colleagues. You can have several SIP-accounts on one phone, but it's difficult to manage, you will have to use the webinterface of the phone. I would advice to avoid this. In this case you could have an extension "office 2" or "Jack+Peter".

So extension are not the same as people in many scenarios. Often people want to sync their AD with the pbx. The AD is nice as a starting point, but in practice there are so many differences, that you don't want your AD to be synced to your pbx. The AD is for users, the pbx is for extensions.

I would love it, if sometime in the future there would be a "user" table/object inside the pbx. So you can assign multiple users to one extension (if they share a phone) and multiple extensions to one user (if the user is often moving between his office, the lab and ...). This would enable a lot of nice applications, including AD sync, a more sophisticated phonebook, which reflects the above secnarious and more. This way the call history for users could include multiple extensions ...
 
Consider that when you dial a land-line number, you could (initially) reach anyone at that home, or business, as you are not being specific as to the particular person you wish to reach. When you dial a mobile number, you expect to reach the owner of that phone. Because a 3CX extension number can be assigned to a fixed device (a wired set at a location), or a mobile device, carried by one person, or could be a combination, you have to decide what scenario best fits a particular situation for each extension number you wish to use. It is as flexible as you want it to be.
 
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