How can an Administrator change Call Forwarding or DND for a user?

Newbie question: Is there a way for an Administrator to change Call Forwarding or DND for an end user? I can see if these features are active through User Management, but the only way I have found to modify them is through the UCP. The only 2 ways I have found is to log into the UCP as that end user or as another user that has rights to modify another person’s settings. If I choose the latter I have to specify each user has rights to do this. I’m sure there is an easy way, but it is evading me.

Have you looked at the extension settings for the extensions in question? I think both of those are settings in the extension for each extension. If the users are messing up these options, it sounds like it should be time to take away their keys.

If you want to do a mass update, you can use the bulk handler to make updates to all of the extensions at once using a CSV file.

Thanks for the reply. Under the Extension Module main page I can see if a user has the CF, CFB, CFU or DND feature turned on. When I edit a User I don’t see options to directly manipulate these user settings. I can change the Call Forward Ring time and set some things under “Optional Destinations”. That’s all I see.

Try going to User Administration. Create a new user (Call it whatever you’d like), click on UCP and then Miscellaneous. The allowed extention settings is what you’re looking for. Add the extensions you would like this user to manage. If you want to lock users out of that feature you can either edit each user manually or create a group and put the users in that and then remove the default User Primary Extension. This will only work for UCP. The user could still change the status using feature codes if it’s enabled and/or use the phones built in DND/CF which you may or may not be able to disable depending on the make/model

We do this via an operator software like FOP2.
There you have one screen where you can change or activate follow-me, DND and call forwarding for all your extensions.

It seems strange that you can change these features from UCP and other applications like FOP2, but not from the administrative interface. Perhaps there was a design decision made at some time to not include these. Oh well. Thanks for your replies.

Your original question had a strange assumption built in that I’m not sure about.

You said:

To be clear - these are not functions of an end user - they are functions of an extension or extensions that are managed in the system. Unless you are using the largely deprecated “Users and Groups” mode, there is little relationship between a user and their extension. In “Extensions” mode, all of this is managed through the extension interface.

Now, in UCP, the user is granted rights to turn these features on and off on certain extensions, as configured in the list of extensions they manage, but only insofar as they are managing these extensions.

An Administrator wouldn’t manage the day-to-day settings of these features - that’s why the administrator gives the users the ability to control these things. The administrator also decides (at the system level) whether these features will be turned on or turned off at the system level.

I’m still not sure what problem you are trying to solve. Are you trying to manage the DND and CF settings for a specific extension? Do you not want DND and CF for the extensions? Are you trying to turn these on and off for a specific extension at a specific user’s desk?

Regardless of your answer, there is a way for the Administrator to manage all of these settings. There are settings for the extensions themselves and the realtime database in Asterisk contains the current settings for each of these for each phone. As the administrator, you can modify these things on the fly.

Sorry for the necro-post on this thread, but we ran into this the other day. The user entered an invalid number when setting up a call forward via a feature code shortcut, and the invalid number was in the system causing calls to that extension to not complete. Fixing this required adding the ext. to my UCP user and then I was able to fix it. It would have been nice to just be able to fix it in the admin interface.

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We come across this all the time where the phone admin is asked to change someone’s call forwarding. It should not be so many hoops to jump thru to accomplish this simple common task. The extension settings module already displays the info. It would likely be trivial to add the ability to change it there also.

The good news - it is dead simple from the CLI to change this. You just clear the Asterisk database setting for the CF. The DND has a similar setting in the database. It is also simple enough to log into the UCP interface as the user and change the setting while in there.

The bad news - the phone could be doing the DND and CF. Depending on your phone and how the user did it, there may be no way from anywhere but the phone to turn these features on and off. Even UCP will not change the setting if the phone is the culprit.

If you want the extensions settings module to be able to do this, submit a feature request.

Really it’s a good feature.
We have other case that FreePBX users are mapped to traditional PBX (don’t ask the reason:) ). So admin needs to define CFU for these extensions!

Sangoma team, please add this feature in FreePBX 15!

FreePBX 15 is soon going to become stable, meaning, they probably won’t add this in 15.
If you want to see it in 16, open a feature request (if there isn’t one yet.) issues.freepbx.org

Also, this is a great script from @lgaetz I sometimes use.

and if you want to get your hands a little dirty, there’s documentation how to make a custom module, so you can add this to the GUI of your FreePBX
https://wiki.freepbx.org/display/FOP/FreePBX+Development
https://wiki.freepbx.org/display/FOP/FreePBX+Module+Generator

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Yes we handled it.
It’s a main feature that I think should be there as default.

Hope see this in 16.

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I have seen multiple requests for this feature for years! How is it not in 15 already? Its a major pain to have to setup a user UCP just to change the call forwarding. Many times users set DND or call forwarding by accident and we have to turn it off for them. There is a screen with extension status, how hard would it have been to make these toggle buttons to turn it on/off right there from the display?

I think @lgaetz has some php code/bash scripts for this on his Github. Maybe we can get a comment from the author.

DND script is linked above. Call forwarding script is new and can be found here:

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While this is a great script and it solves a problem there is an issue. Running this on v15 means you can’t include it in the backups so how does one guarantee this script can survive a backup/restore if the system goes belly up OR needs to be migrated to another system?

Add this to your master version, then copy that when you need to add a new customer. Keep the master upto date.
Then the issue is when you make changes to custom code. Rsync to the rescue.

I mentioned a related issue a little while ago - each “module” is responsible now for what get backed up as part of that module’s config. Since this isn’t a module (or is it?) how would this get backed up?

It’s becoming clear to me that we need something “from the team” that explains how to “extend” the B/R process to include “our” stuff.

This will be a nice feature to add a gui for this.
At the Moment we use the asterisk cli to add CF for extension 222 to forward to 666
—8<—
database put CF 222 666
—8<—