Centrally enable and disable call forwarding

General Help
1

Hi,

I need to be able to centrally enable and disable call forwardings for all extensions on my PBX. The reason for this is that the attendant can enable forwarding if employees are on holiday or sick. Is there a way to do this in FreePBX or is there a third-party module that accomplishes that?

Kind regards,

Jens

2

There are three parts to this that you need to know about:

  1. Asterisk has Call Forwarding components as “feature codes”. You can disable the feature codes centrally from the system, but this is not particularly surgical.

  2. The phones often have “speed dial” buttons that implement the feature codes. You can remove these without disabling the feature codes, which would allow you to have Call Forwarding for only those people that know the code.

  3. Many phones implement their own Call Forwarding. You’ll have to disable that on the phone.

  4. The User Control Panel allows for Call Forwarding to be set on the user’s extension. if you don’t want everyone to be able to do that, you’ll have to limit it in the UCP.

It seems to me that you can assign a person to be the manager for several people in UCP, and they would then be able to set or clear the Call Forwarding for their employees. Note that this is a rumor as far as I’m concerned; I haven’t used UCP for much of anything, so I don’t actually know the full extent of the functionality.

To my way of thinking, the UCP approach would be the simplest. Disable all of the CF stuff on the phones and manage it exclusively through UCP.