Moving phones between sites

[Brad Kopecky]

I am supporting a company who has a seperate pbx for each of their four sites. They want to be able to move extensions and phones between sites if they move an employee so that phone numbers do not change. They are very insistent on this way of doing things so no changing that. We have Bridges setup between all four sites so when a phone is moved, everything works...except, we can no longer provision that phone or assign the phone to an extension as the phone shows at the site it is now located at but we cannot assign an extension to that phone because the extension belongs to another site.

Any suggestions on how to configure this? I am assuming that we have the bridges setup, we do not also need SBC but that might be flawed and installing SBC solves the issue.

Thanks!

 

[JohnS_3CX]

Hi Brad,

To accomplish this you would have to delete the user and device from site A and create them in site B and reprovision their phone. If the user had their own DID, you also have to recreate the trunk on site B and transfer the number, OR keep a dummy extension on site A and forward it via bridge to site B's extension.

Since this does not happen very often, it should not be an issue. Otherwise, the use can simply utilize the webclient, mobile client or desktop client so it no longer matters what site they are in and you don't have to migrate them across different PBX instances.

 

[David Argles]

Could you just use SBC and hotdesking?

 

[Brad Kopecky]

I am trying to sell them on the web client but they are pretty set on using physical phones. They want to keep the same numbers even though they move sites and each site has a unique PBX (don't ask). They had a Shoretel system that allowed phones to move between sites very smoothly which is part of the issue.

Hot desking does not solve the provisioning issue (I believe) but I will try that.

If we already have bridges in place, do we still need to setup SBC? It would seem that bridging in place should allow for provisioning to other sites, I am perplexed as to why it does not.

 

[JohnS_3CX]

Hi Brad,

The bridge is not a means for provisioning. Provisioning is only available for the phones that belong to a specific PBX, only they can have access to it's subsystems.

The bridge is a means for communicating between extensions that belong to different PBXs and for having the ability to use the trunks of another PBX. Think of it as a trunk that connects your system to another system only for passing calls through.

https://www.3cx.com/docs/manual/connecting-pbx-bridges/