Shared Call Park Shortage

[TJ Dean]

Hey Everyone,

I have a POC setup with the free license V15.5, with some Yealink T46S phones. I've been testing out the system and love what I see so far but I'm stuck when it's come to shared call parks. If I choose to go with 3CX, I will be installing these phones in close to 300 locations and that puts me at a little over 2000 handsets. We rely heavily on the call park feature and I'd like to assign 4 dedicated call parks per location.

From playing around with the system it looks like i'm limited to 50 shared call parks. Is this the case only for the free version or is there a way I can create more? I'd really like to avoid doing regionally shared call parks like I've had to do in the past. Ideally I'd like at least 1200 call park destinations!

Is this possible? I've been playing with subbing in "dummy extensions" for each location rather than call parks, but I have yet to get it working smoothly.

Thanks!!

 

[Saqqara]

50 call parking locations is the max allowed in all versions of 3CX

 

[craigreilly]

Considering the biggest call license is 1200 - is this even viable?
Or is 1200 the largest license available shown online and larger deployments can be achieved thru Sales Channels?

 

[VoIPTools]

Keep in mind that he is talking about 2000 handsets, not 2000 simultaneous calls. He could probably host between 3000 and 4000 handsets on a 1024 SC license depending on use patterns. Also,1024 is not necessarily the largest 3CX option. I've heard that's just the largest "published" edition. I've heard there is a 2048 out there. But with some considerations, you could bridge two servers together to function "like" one server. There are some issues, including a shared company directory, reports, etc. that would need to be addressed, but even those issues could be addressed if needed. The one thing I don't think we can change is the number of parking locations. I think that has a hard limit.

 

[craigreilly]

I know he was referring to 2000 handsets... I guess really then you wouldn't have 1200 parked calls all at once either. but its fun to think about. Weak moment - brain was hungry.

 

[VoIPTools]

It's a very fair question. True, you can see if someone is already parked at that location and use a different location, but if you have several locations sharing the same parking locations you could get some contention for available locations. One possibility would be to add a slide-out panel to 3CX Phone that shows just the locations in use, and you could simply press a button to park, and let the application chose where to park and have it tell you where the caller was parked. That would give them access to many more "shared" locations and reduce the possibility for contention. I suppose if we wanted to get really crazy we could start using queues for parking locations but now we are really getting "creative". Oh, how about this one... we setup a small bridged PBX who's sole purpose is to host additional parking locations . If there is sufficient desire, there is almost always a way.

 

[craigreilly]

how about parking spots? (never used them myself)

 

[VoIPTools]

I don't recommend using the legacy parking system. It's not incorporated into any of the clients and is just there for backwards compatibility. Still, I guess that's another option too.

 

[TJ Dean]

I believe we would be fine with the 1024 simultaneous calls, that shouldn't be an issue with our 300 sites. I was thinking if we put a NUC at each location with a 3CX appliance running on it maybe that would get us where we need to be. The problem is I really don't want anymore hardware on site other than phones, and we would just host everything out of our data centers. Spinning up multiple instances of 3CX would take quite a few machines to get us to 1200.

I contemplated the parking spot system, but end-users really need the BLF feature of just parking on a park-orbit. If only there was a way to set an extension to auto-forward to on hold, then I could allow barge on that extension and program all the phones at the site to have it as a BLF. They should be able to forward calls to the extension and have them "park", and just barge to pick the call back up. I think the BLF wouldn't reflect "on a call" if the extension had a call on hold.

 

[Michael Groom]

Based on your needs thus far the best solution would be a nuc at each site and bridge them together if needed. Still not sure if that would work, not sure if you could physically bridge 300 systems together. They may just need to be stand alones. Also are all of these sites tied together with vpn's?

 

[TJ Dean]

Based on your needs thus far the best solution would be a nuc at each site and bridge them together if needed. Still not sure if that would work, not sure if you could physically bridge 300 systems together. They may just need to be stand alones. Also are all of these sites tied together with vpn's?

We have an SDWAN solution connecting all of our sites together. They all will be connecting back to our 2 main data centers hosting our instances of 3CX. Our secondary instance will be at our fail-over DC, which hopefully will never need to be used.