Karl Stallknecht

Darren: does this automatically shut off when the phone re-registers?

I'm sure this is possible, but it would be difficult to build. Here is my logic: You can enable loss of registration emails to send to you every time the phone loses registration. You could send these emails to a script on a server and if you write some sort of script that looks at the percentage of loss of registration emails for the account's devices, you could then have it trigger an API to change a call flow. Of course you'd want to have it double check that the phones haven't all come back online after x minutes, since a brief power outage for example might cause you to receive loss of registration emails for every device even though the devices all come back online minutes later. You would also need to have it check every x minutes to see if the devices had re-registered and thus revert the call flow. All of this is doable as far as I can see, but just difficult and would have a lot of moving parts. What we do is just have the loss of registration emails get sent into our staff email that is monitored 24/7 and we open a support ticket with the customer asking what to do if we see emails for all of their devices and they are still offline when we check the registrations in Kazoo/Monster. We thought that the "automatic" failover to a cell phone would be a great idea, but it turns out that it wasn't as practical as it seems on the surface: 1. More often than not the customer will say to just ignore it if it's close to the end of the day or the customer won't care since an answering service will answer the calls as per their regular callflow setup. Keep in mind if the devices are ALL offline (even in a ring group) then it will skip them and go to the next step instantly, so in the case of an answering service it will go straight to the answering service. 2. Often times the cell phone number that calls should be forwarded to will change depending on who is working that day, meaning you never really know whose cell phone the calls should go to and you need to check with the customer first. 3. If the customer has no power or no Internet, they often times don't want to answer the phones because they can't do anything after answering them (i.e. look up an order, make an appointment, etc) since their Internet and/or power is down. So they are out of business even if they CAN answer the phone. 4. Any sort of automatic system could be annoying and go back and forth if the Internet was "flaky" one day. Thus some calls would go to a cell phone and some would go to the desk phone. It's better for this reason to just manually turn it on or off, unless you wrote something to manually turn it on and then require human intervention to turn it off. But again, very minor blips could trigger the forwarding which would get annoying if the customer had to keep contacting someone to disable it.

Darren: should I file this under Kazoo or UI? It's both I think?

10-4, sorry for the confusion I just assumed it was already there! :-)

Oh, I thought you already did. Aaron said he was going to and you (Darren) said "I think we will do the copy phone thing but AFTER those two items" so I presumed it had already been added.

Darren: I think this could tie into being able to copy or replicate BLF fields across the same model of phone. https://helpcenter.2600hz.com/2600hz/topics/line-key-settings-in-account-settings https://helpcenter.2600hz.com/2600hz/topics/additions-to-provider-account-settings-in-advanced-provi... Do you have a JIRA ticket number for this?

We have brief documentation for the basics, but for most things we just tell people to call us. Our entire business model is selling to people who aren't capable of managing the phones themselves haha.

Hmm, I'm trying to think about how this would be engineered. Where would the "list" come from or get its data from? I agree though, it would be useful to avoid having to replace BLF on many of the same model phones.

Hmm, I thought they were the same for both CID and e911...I tested it a while back though.

It's:  Device -> User -> Main Company Device will always override user which will always override account/main company. If nothing is set, it looks for the next one down the line (i.e. user or main company)

The problem here is that you can run any kind of test for a week straight and it can look great, and then suddenly the customer can have horrible problems. One of the local ISPs here, Cox, works really well most of the time but still has blips every month or so where calling quality will be terrible for a period of hours or days. The Internet is always changing and there are millions of things that can affect Internet quality at someone's location...it's not like a cell phone signal where if you are stationary it will remain the same quality (under normal circumstances). Sorry to sound so negative, I just wouldn't advise wasting huge amounts of your time to come up with fancy tests, because chances are you'll just happen to run the test at a time when nothing is wrong thinking the Internet is perfect, and then you'll regret it after installation.

Right, but then the customers are still using a horribly slow DSL connection to download/upload files on their computers. As for using the same wiring, it can still be problematic and as a general rule of thumb it's best to physically separate if possible.

DSL works fine AS LONG AS it's dedicated to the VoIP. For example, several of our customers have Comcast which is notoriously horrible for VoIP. What we do for them is get a secondary internet connection (a DSL line) and connect ONLY their phones to that DSL line. DSL is usually really reliable (at least Verizon DSL in the D.C. area is) but the issue becomes if you connect computers to it too then when they try to download or upload files it sucks up all of the bandwidth which causes call quality issues. Obviously you can implement QoS but in order to do it correctly you need expensive equipment plus then the customer has a horribly slow computer connection. So again, it's easier just to separate the network and have the data network on Comcast/cable and the "voice" network on the Verizon DSL line. That combination makes customers super happy usually, it just involves extra wiring in some situations if they only have one drop per desk/office.

We subscribed our staff email to it so we will all receive notifications!

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant thanks for being proactive with posting it on StatusPage! :-) I understand the community isn't the expected place for quick updates.

Fantastic. Thanks for being proactive with posting this guys. Saved both you and us a support ticket!

To clarify, are you just adjusting DNS records or what exactly is going on? i.e. if we have a customer with the east coast proxy IP manually programmed in will they be fine with your fixes, or were your "re-routing traffic" fixes just adjusting DNS records?

Advanced call flows...sorry, that was a typo

My apologies - I thought the purpose of advanced PBX was also to keep you from breaking things in SmartPBX by hiding the things that could break if you edited them?

I believe you can use advanced callflows in Monster to safely manually edit the caller ID, but don't quote me on that ;-)

Sorry, I filled out the form within minutes of Aaron posting this but I just never responded here!

How about doing a roll over with the secretary as the next item in the call flow? (i.e. ring boss for 20 seconds and then ring secretary for 5 seconds) You could pre-pend the caller ID so the secretary would hear it ring and would see "FWD" or something before the caller ID so he/she would know it was a call that the boss didn't pick up that's being forwarded to him/her.

If you want it to actually ring then I would use a ring group. Why don't you want to use a ring group?

I'm not sure how you could make this all work under one key (it might be possible we just aren't aware of it), but here's what we do: - On the secretary's phone add a BLF key for the boss. - Setup a callflow (any number you want) and use the "directed call pickup" option in the call flow, selecting the boss's phone - On the secretary's phone, add another feature key and make it a speed dial for the call flow mentioned above (i.e. Pickup Boss) When the boss gets a call, the secretary will see the BLF key for the boss blinking red and then he/she can press the "Pickup Boss" key. I know that Polycoms have a "pickup" key that with some systems you can use to press before you press a BLF/speed dial key, but I've never figured out how to make it work on Kazoo.

FYI we use Vitelity for our clients who are heavily dependent on faxing. They have a TDM network which has been flawless for us. Any day that 2600hz has a reliable TDM network though we'll happily switch all faxing services back to them :-) Yes we don't like using two providers, but it's better to do this and have reliable faxing for clients who will complain if it isn't perfect.