Looking for recommendation: emergency announcement

[ITSP]

Hi,

I am after some ideas please. As a public school, we're required to have an announcement on our phone system in order to direct parents who might (will) call in. The message will let them know that the school is on lockdown. In V16, we accomplished this by setting up a "Lockdown" extension number. All incoming calls get directed to this number. If the extension status is set to Available, the caller gets redirect to a digital receptionist number which plays the lockdown announcement and then hangs up. If the status is Not Available, the caller then gets routed to the receptionist ring group. We trigger the lockdown by having an incident command member's laptop log in to the lockdown extension (by double-clicking a desktop shortcut that opens up a provisioning config file in the client app). With V18, this option no longer works because the desktop client no longer allows re-provisioning (or so we believe).

Has anyone else managed to do something similar? I would be keen to know how you got it working.

I would've filed this as a feature request but I can't seem to find where to submit.

 

[Evolute IT]

The CFD would probably be a good place to start.

Call once to trigger lockdown mode, call another time to disable it. Then another CFD checks that status and either forward to the regular IVR or it plays the lockdown prompt.

 

[SteveITS]

With V18, this option no longer works because the desktop client no longer allows re-provisioning (or so we believe).

The legacy Windows Client does work in v18, it's just not being updated. So you could keep using it for a while. The new Desktop App doesn't allow for switching extensions...one logs in or out just like the web client. So the new way would be to pull up a browser, log in and change status.