I have 2 freepbx boxes in separate offices joined by VPN and IAX trunk.
This is a doc’s office and the doc travels from one to the other frequently. She doesn’t want to miss calls during travel between offices so asked if I could show her how to forward all calls to her cell phone.
There are 4 extensions in each office. Currently each office is setup with ring groups that ring all phones at that office, if no one answers, it transfers to the other office and rings all phones. If no one answers there it goes to voicemail.
My SIP provider does not offer the service of call forwarding. They only provide the trunks. Therefore all call forwarding will be handled by the system.
This needs to be a simple solution, easy to do and easy to undo. I was considering creating another ring group that only included her cell phone and then just having her change the destination in the time group.
This is what I do which might work for you and is very simple. I have a follow me on my extension that simultanously rings my cell phone. After x number of seconds the followme is set to go to the extension voicemail.
The one thing to make sure of is that the cell phone voicemail does not answer before x seconds otherwise the call will go to cellphone voicemail. You usually have an extra couple seconds before the cell phone starts ringing.
Haven’t thought through your whole situation with 2 pbx’s and ring groups which complicates things.
Well that’s a good starting point. I know they are just going to have to forward the calls from both offices so don’t beat yourself up trying to figure out something special for that.
I’ll give the follow me method a try and see what happens.
On follow me you can also check the confirm calls box, that forces the cellphone user to press one to accept the call. This keeps the calls from going to cellphone voicemail.
I found the confirm calls thing problematic because there isn’t much time to answer and confirm unless you want to have a long ring time before going to voicemail.
I find I do have to have a longer ring time as well, and of course it depends on how quickly you start ringing the cellphone, and how long it takes to setup and deliver the call, which can vary base on your outbound route, and your cell carrier, your coverage and your default settings on your phones (for example cdma phones can be set to ping for incoming calls more often, at the expense of your battery levels, but this is not generally a setting exposed to the end user without going into the advance carrier programming on the phone.) usually takes some tweaking to get right.
OK, I couldn’t make Follow me work. I think it’s because of the way I have everything else setup. Incoming calls are routed through time conditions first and then to a ring group. I have all extensions in the ring group. If I choose 1 extension in the group and setup a follow me, nothing happens.
What I did was setup another ring group with just the cell phone number in it. I then told them they have to change the time conditions from 1 ring group to the other. They have to do this on both PBX’s so it’s kind of a pain but it works.
Does anyone have any idea why Follow me doesn’t work?
