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Extension Best Practice

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petewatterschats

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In most cases an extension will have a one to one relationship with a specific person.

This person may have a hard phone, windows soft phone, iPad (Tablet) soft phone and a smart phone (IOS, Andriod, Windows)

We can provision each of these phones with one extension that belongs to the one person so that when they receive a call all phones will ring.

Another option is to give each phone an extension and create a ring group for the person.

Another option is to let the person setup their own forwarding rules that can be changed by their changing cercumstances

I would appreciate hearing opinions
 
In my opinion folks do not like things like this forced upon them. Give them their options and let them use it.
Personally: I barely use the softphone on iOS since I have unlimited phone minutes and my data plan is limited. So I forward calls to my cell - when I am out of the office - but need to be accessible. If on vacation, then I probably forward to voicemail. I will use the softphone when out of the country as a cheap means of making and receiving calls - but have found some hotels blocking ports.

I occasionally use the softphone when at the office and want to pickup a call on Park.

I like your idea of a ring group - and use that for some things - like IT. Call ext 800 and get my desk and the server room both.

But for me - in the installations I have done - we ask each user what suits their needs best. This may not work in very large installs.
 
I agree with Craig; there is not a best option, just options to discuss and review to determine which is best for a particular implementation.

However, for the average person, I would usually consider the single extension number option for multiple devices first, primarily for voice mail processing. With one extension, a message in their voice mailbox will reflect message waiting status on all devices and allow common access and viewing from any phone. With multiple extensions, you would have to pick one extension to use for the primary voice mailbox, make sure other extensions forward to the primary mailbox to leave messages, and then can only check message status from the primary extension (excluding options such as forward-to-email).
 
Hi,

I agree that the choice depends on the use case. But there are some general choices you have to make as a manager and you have to chose, what to offer your user, who often doesn't want to bother with 10 differen technial possiblities.

Things to consider:

Code:
extensions/ring-groups : person
is just one relation you have to define the other is
Code:
extensions: deskphones
Deskphones do support multiple SIP accounts and one extension can be provisioned on multiple deskphones.
There are several reasons why a phone should only have one account and why an extension should only be provisioned on one phone, but there can be good reasons to make an exception.

Always try to use the system the way it is intended:
1person:1extension:1deskphones
You won't have any provisioning trouble and call history, call info displayed, and presence, voicebox, sofphone, CTI, forward settings, all will work just fine

In other settings you have to check:

call info displayed on the deskphone /softphone:
Does the callee see who is calling and which number de dialed (my not work for ringgroups and forwarded calls)

call history on deskphone/softphone
Does the person see missed calls and answered calls? (even if the call was answered on another phone, other ring group member ....)

telephonebook:
How do you intend to manage the telephone book? Which persons do you want to show. You have to manually add ringgroups as fas as I remember (in the telephonebook) If there are multiple entries for one person, which is shown in the phone display?

And if you want to use a lot of ring-groups remember, that you need additional telephone numbers/DID, as you need numbers of each telephone/extension and each ringgroup.
 
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