Manually set a whole ring group to "On a break"

[PBX_Programmer]

Our customer has got calls coming into a ring group with 3 members. They want to have the ability to randomly set the whole ring group to an away status, such as "On a break", whenever they want to. For example the manager may walk in at any time and call a meeting, and they want to be able to press something or dial something on one of the phones which sets the whole group to away or on a break so that any further incoming calls go directly to a specific voice mailbox, not ringing on the phones first, until the meeting ends and they press/dial something to return the group to an available status.

Is that something which can be done, please? I can't find any way to manually switch a group's available/break status, only via schedules which is not what I need.

Thanks

 

[KeithA]

Hi,
Can't see any option to change the ring group status, but if all the group members set themselves as DND on the phones
any calls to the ring group should go to what set on Destination if no answer for the ring group eg

Regards
Keith

 

[PBX_Programmer]

Hi,
Can't see any option to change the ring group status, but if all the group members set themselves as DND on the phones
any calls to the ring group should go to what set on Destination if no answer for the ring group eg
View attachment 44845
Regards
Keith

Hi Keith,

Thanks for answering. I did see that they can do it if they individually set each user to DND, but for this particular customer I don't think that would be ok. There are only 3 users in the group but one of them is using the 3CX app on a mobile and therefore may not be physically present in the office and therefore may not be able to go on DND when required, so would still receive calls and the group would not divert calls to VM as intended. It seems strange to me that the whole group cannot be randomly set to DND/break randomly as required, aside from a fixed schedule.

Thanks

 

[VoIPTools]

Rather than route calls directly to the ring group, you could route to a dummy extension. Then, based on the presence status of that dummy extension either route the calls to the ring group, or to the voicemail box of the dummy extension.

 

[PBX_Programmer]

Rather than route calls directly to the ring group, you could route to a dummy extension. Then, based on the presence status of that dummy extension either route the calls to the ring group, or to the voicemail box of the dummy extension.

Ok thanks for that suggestion. I was thinking about doing something like that for them, but then how will they go about changing the status of that dummy extension to busy or whatever? I suppose they can log into the admin console and do it that way but I think they're hoping for a very quick way to do it.

 

[VoIPTools]

They could log into a web client and change it there, you could define a BLF on a phone, or if you REALLY wanted it to be simple, we could use the API to change it and just give them a web page. Or we could build a Call Flow Designer that you call and it toggles the presence. There are plenty of different ways you could do it.