Several issues

[Peter Richardson]

Hi all,
New setup on Linux but having a few issues:

Company phone book is displaying surname first

Voicemail are being created for every call that was missed or answered. Voice mails are blank / silent.

When someone has selected DND it is not showing on other BLFs . So receptionist doesn't know when someone is in their office but doesn't want calls transferred to them.

Calls are being terminated after 30 seconds by the PBX.

 

[Peter Richardson]

Calls being terminated are only inbound calls not outbound calls

 

[jonpennell]

Company phone book is displaying surname first

Contacts/Options/Phonebook display?

When someone has selected DND it is not showing on other BLFs . So receptionist doesn't know when someone is in their office but doesn't want calls transferred to them.

Sadly, 3cx separates out the concept of presence... when I select DND on my Yealink, it correctly sets extension presence to "Do not disturb" but this is not reported by monitoring BLFs (as it would be in Asterisk). Mentioning this will draw you criticism ranging from "Why would you want it to" to "It's too confusing since IP phones don't understand a BLF status of DND and display phone-in-use instead". You could try (yet another) post in the "ideas" section - but don't hold your breath

 

[YiannisH_3CX]

Hello @Peter Richardson

What version PBX are you running? What version of Linux is the phone system running on?
Is it a local or hosted installation? Did you use the 3CX iso to install the phone system?

Calls are being terminated after 30 seconds by the PBX.

This could indicate an issue with the PBX not receiving an ACK message from the provider so the call is terminated. Make sure that you pass the firewall checker as this is usually a firewall issue.

Voicemail are being created for every call that was missed or answered. Voice mails are blank / silent.

Does this happen with internal calls as well or just with calls coming from the provider?

 

[Peter Richardson]

@jonpennell
Thanks for your reply. Phonebook issue solved.
With the BLF issue - "why would you want to" is simple - this is a financial planning firm and when they have a client in their office, they don't want to receive calls, but they would also like it if the receptionist was able to see if they have a client in their office so that they can advise other callers of this and give them the option to either a) leave a voice mail; b) leave a message with the receptionist or c) speak with someone else in the company instead of having to find out the hard way, then hangup and call again to complete the circle, but then maybe do that circle again if they are put through to someone else who also has a client in their office. See the problem? So what is the solution to this - surely I am not the first one in the world who has a client who wants this feature?

@YiannisH_3CX
3CX 15.5.0
Debian 8 Jessie
Hosted installation
We have a template VM that we always use, so we just copied the template, installed it then updated it.
Firewall check passed.
We saw it happening live with the client when they were receiving a call - it happened 3 times in a row. We did not test with internal calls for longer than 30 seconds. I tried to look up the logs today, but as the logs are set for default only 1 day retention, they were all gone by the time I checked. I have changed it to keep logs for 30 days and bumped it up to medium. I just tried calling in and calling out and the call stayed for over 1 minute, and I have not changed anything. Now I am confused.

 

[jonpennell]

Hi Peter, I'm afraid you misunderstood me - I would *love* the BLF on my Yealinks to indicate the DND status of the extension presence - I was indicating the attitude you'll find from other 3cx users.

I have raised this several times - coming from the Asterisk world where dialling the DND code on an extension is indicated on monitoring BLFs as busy

I'm afraid this is just going to have to be one of those things you live with since I don't believe you'll get enough votes in the ideas section to have 3cx look at changing how it currently works.

I am still totally torn. I love the "unified client" concept of 3cx although the chat system really is quite abysmal and needs work. Right now, the nearest competitors are well-known... one of them provides a mobile client but the desktop client looks overly fussy. The other has a mobile client in beta and right now doesn't hold a candle to 3cx. Yet, some of the "eccentricities" of 3cx make me quietly fume as it could be SO much better. Things like 1) why do I have to use the overly-restrictive call queue module if I want music on early media rather than ringing, 2) why does the SIP forking behaviour differ between a ring group, call queue and directly calling an extension, 3) why does a call queue need to poll for free agents every 1 or 2 seconds - if this was configurable the call queue feature would become 10 times more useful to some (like me).

In short, the BLF is NOT updated and as far as I can see, never will be. The response will, I believe, be "use the web client or windows client to see presence". Totally impractical in many business.

[Edit] Peter, BTW, I should mention that somewhere on the forum someone said they had implemented some kind of workaround which caused a phone to park a call "forever" when in DND so it appeared "in-use" to other phones BLF but I doubt this would be any use in a commercial environment - I don't think the poster was overly-enamoured with his solution either.

 

[YiannisH_3CX]

@Peter Richardson

You could have the receptionist use the web client with the IP phone. You can easily monitor each extensions status and it is easier to manage calls, transfers etc using the web client.

Regarding the calls issue i would recommend monitoring the situation and see under which circumstances the issue occurs. I would reduce the log retention days to a week max and enable verbose logging so that when the issue happens you have full logs. Do not keep it for long though cause verbose logging is resource intensive.

 

[jonpennell]

In short, the BLF is NOT updated and as far as I can see, never will be. The response will, I believe, be "use the web client or windows client to see presence". Totally impractical in many business.

Oh the irony!