Same BLF for multiple time controls / best practice for time control with holidays?

Have a small office with FreePBX and Some Aastra 6757i phones. Trying to figure out how I am going to handle the call routing.

Open Mon-Thu 7:30-5:30pm… Closed most holidays… And also need to turn on machine sometimes during the day for occasional staff meetings, trainings, etc. Need to be able to turn off the machine on the occasional Friday when someone is here answering phones…

Was planning a few cascading time control groups to handle the open/close/holiday scenarios. However, I would like some indicating to the users in the office what mode we are in and also give them the ability to override it…

So,
*271 -> Normal Hours Open/Close.
*272 -> Holidays listing of all holidays.

Will I need to setup multiple BLFs for each of those? I am kind wondering if it wouldn’t be more flexible to just use Cron or something to toggle the normal open/close holiday on holidays?

I’d love to learn what the best practice is for this type of scenario. How are most people doing this?

thanks,

-jr

You can do a single time group with multiple conditions to cover your holidays and closed hours, and then link that single time group to a single time condition, linked to a feature code that is linked to a BLF. So there,'d be one button that indicates to the users whether they are open or closed and which they can override as needed.

To get the BLF working, you may have to Enable Custom Device States in the Advanced Settings Module.

Just to clarify, after you create the Time Group with your closed hours, go back into it and you’ll see that you can add additional time sets to the group. Each time you hit submit and go back, you’ll have the chance to add more sets of times to the group.

So, you can have one Time Group that defines your closed hours in the first section, and then another section covering the entire weekend, and then another section defining Xmas, and another section defining Thanksgiving, and so on, until you have a single Time Group that defines anytime you are ever closed…

Here’s a sample configuration that I wrote showing you how to combine all Holidays into a single Time Group. You just need to add your closed hours and weekends…

http://wiki.freepbx.org/display/F2/Time+Groups+Sample+Configurations