Multiple profiles during office hours

[Daedalus Computing]

Please could someone advise whether there is a simple way to achieve this:

We have a system which is fairly normal with call routing based on office hours and outside. However, for this (small) office, we would also like to facility to be able to switch the whole system into a secondary profile whereby the office is empty during office hours, so calls follow a different rule. In other words, a switchover to a different set of rules but not based on time. Ideally any of the users can set this on or off from their handset.

NB The change based on time needs still to apply.

I cannot see an obvious way to achieve this.

Thank you very much for any advice

 

[VoIPTools]

You can force the PBX IN and OUT of the office using a dial code. See Settings --> Dial Codes.

 

[Daedalus Computing]

Thank you very much. If I have understood correctly, this will force all extensions to "Away" status so that I can set up rules in one of them to (eg) forward calls?

 

[Daedalus Computing]

I've just tested and it doesn't at all seem to do what I had expected. In fact, I can't see what it does at all. I think it just toggles between day and night mode? In which case that's not what I had hoped.

I believe that I could do it by using DND on an extension but that is one extension and I was hoping to have a "whole office" change.

 

[VoIPTools]

If I understand your request better now, changing the PBX to OUT of office does change the entire PBX, but you are right, it doesn't necessarily change how a call to a user extension is routed.

For example, if you had an IVR that said something like "We are currently working from home today. If you know your party's extension, you can dial it at any time". If the caller dials my extension, it's going to route the same way regardless of whether the PBX in IN or OUT.

It sounds like you would like one button you could press to (1) change your PBX to OUT, AND (2) change the presence setting for each extension to "AWAY".

This is not built-in to 3CX but it is possible to create a button you could assign to your phone or an extension you could dial to make these changes. But it will require writing code.

You could create a Call Flow Designer (CFD) application that when called toggles the PBX mode (IN/OUT) and updates all the user extensions presence to "Away". To change the extension's profile status you will need to use the 3CX Call Control API with C# code. You will need to:

1. Obtain a list of extensions
2. Update the profile status

I've not tested this, but I think this might work:

extension.UserStatus = UserStatusType.Away

I'll do some further research and add this capability to our VoIPTools REST API.

 

[Daedalus Computing]

Thank you very much for this. That does sound like the most elegant solution, but more than a little complex at present. As a stopgap, I have tested with the "fallback" option of having one of the extensions set manually to DND and have forwarding set there.

In practice what we need at present is that incoming external calls to a ringing group are instead diverted to an external answering service when there's no-one in the office. With this solution, which seems to work, one of the phones can be set to DND manually (it's only a single small office) and when that phone rings within the group, it transfers the call. At least it seems to work from what little testing I've managed to do so far. It's certainly not as elegant as the solution you've proposed, but I think it may suffice.

Unless you can think of any reason why it might be problematic to do it this way?

NB - I will probably change from using DND to using one of the other statuses and set a BLF for enabling and disabling, so that DND is still available.

Ahh. I may have spoken too soon. This seems to work if I call the ringing group internally, but not if I call it from outside; despite the forwarding rule being set for external calls too. Is that WAD? It seems odd to have a setting and then have that setting not be acted upon.