Ok been searching the forums on this and found some posts that were similar but not quite the same. Few searches online but with no solution.
Currently I have a DID goto a Ring Group if no-one answers in the ring group it dumps to voicemail. This is perfect.
If they lose internet I want those calls to then forward to a cell phone.
The strategy would be something like this.
DID>RG>VMAIL - OK
DID>RG - OK
DID>RG-OFFLINE>Cellphone - OK
If I did two ring groups I lose the normal operation of failing over to a voicemail box when no one is available, but the phones are online as the calls then simply goto the second ring group and ring the cell phone. They don’t want this cell phone ringing if the phones are online, only if they are offline.
Any ideas or points to the right direction would be greatly appreciated.
Stop - if that happens, FreePBX doesn’t get a vote. If the server loses connectivity, you need to have your ITSP forward the calls to a cell phone. If you lose a ring group, you can’t get there from here.
If the client phone loses connectivity and lose their registration, the phone becomes “not available”. If they are in a Ring Group and not available, their phone will simply not ring and the ring group will eventually time out. If everyone in the RG is not available, the group will drop into the no answer destination. The Ring Group’s alternate destination is your only recourse at that point. The “no answer” destination can be a cell phone, but then you lose control over the voicemail.
Remember, a ring group isn’t really a “destination”, it’s a whole bunch of phones ringing at the same time. A Queue is a destination and you can do all kinds of cool crap while the queue is running, but a ring group is going to follow the phone of least resistance.
One of the ways that you can set up your RG is to include everyone’s cell phone number in the Ring Group. Of course, there are issues with that as well, including having the “cell” ringing while the “VOIP Softphone” is ringing. Also, exponentially growing your number of calls isn’t good for performance.
To answer the question you asked in the topic, you can use the “alternate” destinations at the bottom of each extension. If the extension isn’t available, have the call divert to the cell phone (usually through an announcement to start the RTP) and have the others divert to Voice Mail. There are three alternative destinations, you may need to play around with them a little bit to get them set up just the way you want.
So, to recap:
If the server is off-line, your ITSP has to divert the call.
If the ‘ring group’ is off-line, your server is off-line. See above.
If an extension is off-line, send the call using the “unavailable” destination.
The system is hosted at a different location, I should have mentioned that. That said, the idea of queue might fit the bill, I will look into that.
The real issue is we don’t want to lose the functionality of having the ring group dump to a voicemail during normal operations. We only want the cell phone to come into play if the phones are offline.
I will play around with the queue and see what I can do with that. I really appreciate the detailed response and my apologies for not detailing that the server was remote.
The remoteness of the server isn’t the problem - I assumed that.
The point of the message was that, if you can get the call into the PBX (offsite or on), you can use a RG to ring the phones, and if the phones are all off-line, the RG will send the call wherever you want to send it. If that’s VM, that’s cool. If you want it to go to a phone, that works too.
If any of the phones are off-line, you can set up the extensions with alternative destinations as well. The phone doesn’t have to be there for the extension to be processed - it just won’t ring. Once again, the default for this is VoiceMail, but you can control how the call gets handled.
There are pieces that fit in here that need to be looked at as well, including “skip-busy-agents”, which will cause a phone that’s off-hook (on a call) or unregistered (off-line) to not be part of the group. This is where the alternate RG destination starts to make sense. If all of the phones are down, the RG destination kicks is and you call goes wherever you want it to go. This, for example, could be a Ring Group of cell phones (using the format “555-121-2121#”) with “Confirm Call” turned on. If no one answers, the second RG destination (which could be another RG, or VoiceMail, or even a duck quacking) is kicked into gear.
The idea is that the PBX is making all of these calls while the original call is sitting waiting to be bridged. The PBX is a Back to Back User Agent - it doesn’t “route” calls. It answers and places calls, connecting people like an electronic Ernestine.