Dialing Conference Room from IVR

1

Hello,

When configuring the IVR you can allow it to call any extension directly via enable direct dial and in previous versions this allowed the user to dial conference rooms, extensions etc.
Today under 10.13.66-20 we are seeing that the user can not dial the conference room directly.
At that point we add the extension number of the conference room and point it to the conference room of the same number, but the users in some cases gets invalid extension.
One question is did something change in begin able to dial the conference rooms direcctly?

I can get several sources to work and some not, but those not working are a big enough percentage to make it an issue.

Any assistance appreciated!

Note: All trunks set to DTMF RFC 2833

2

Ivr direct dial has never worked for anything but extensions. It has been that way from day 1.

3

Thanks Tony, maybe our tests were internal and i didn’t realize it. It was on one of the older 32bit versions.
I’ll note it.

4

@tonyclewis So then how do you open all conference rooms to IVR? If you have 30 salesmen, it would be hideous to load your IVR with 30 listings.

Sorry to hijack, but there is no point in opening a new topic if this one asks the very question I need answered, and it was not actually answered. :roll_eyes:

5

There are lots of people that can answer your question, but there’s one I’d like to ask first:

How are you envisioning this working? You want to be able to direct dial a conference from an IVR? Why? If you drop an inbound call (even from an IVR) into the conferencing system, you should be able to dial the conference number and PIN from there.

Allowing “too much” access from an IVR is a dangerous precedent to set. The system tries to prevent the big mistakes as much as possible, and allowing “largely unrestricted direct dialing” from an IVR is just too much power in the hand of a neophyte. The level of direct-dial access from the IVRs right now is about right, and users that understand how the system works (or can hire the same) can set up several different scenarios by which “direct dialing” into a conference room works.

6

Fair point, Fair point. it would be easy war dialing to crack the PIN, and no one would be alerted that conferences were being invaded… Though they shouldn’t be able to dial out from there… but it would be a waste of resources even if they spun their wheels in there trying.

Here’s the use case (admittedly rare, but I was confronted with it today). Say you have a salesman that wants to have a bigger conference call than their phone can directly handle (Yealink T46s can only do 3 way conference), and say they want to be able to leave the conference with a sales engineer and move on to another phone call, half-way through.

So “conferences” seemed like the obvious choice. But if I give this to one employee, more will want it. (thus trying to enable one for each salesman)

So what do you think is the most secure way to solve such a problem?

7

‘conferences’ are in the context [ext-meetme]
‘custom extensions’ would be available from the ivr’s.
I haven’t tried it but perhaps make a ‘conference’ for example 9912
add a ‘custom extension’ for example 912 that has the dial set to LOCAL/9912@ext-meetme.
rinse and repeat 30 times.

IVR’s could dial 912 directly and transferring a call to 912 would effectively send it the conference

8

There are three supported ways to add options to an IVR:

  1. Add numbered options to the IVR Entries at the bottom
  2. Set Enable direct dial to “Enabled”, which allows callers to reach only local extensions
  3. Set Enable direct dial to a previously created directory. You can add whatever you want to the directory, local extensions, DIDs, Conferences, Queues, any number at all.
2 Likes