Intercom/Internal Auto Answer from specific extensions

A little Background. Our old phone system had internal intercom/auto answer. We had this feature turned on for all phones internally.

However, there were certain phones such as general use phones and our lobby phone that we did not want to be able to intercom into an employees phone automatically.
The old system had the ability to add a 1 to the end of the extension when dialed and it would ring instead of intercom.

For example, If someone dialed the extension 200, it would intercom and auto answer at extension 200s phone. However, if someone called extension 2001, would ring instead.

Is there anyway to set this up on freepbx or restrict all calls coming FROM certain extensions to ring only?

Under extension settings>Advanced and Other, there are several Intercom and Auto Answer settings which may be what you are looking for. Frequently what I see being done is disabling intercom on manager’s phones (so employees can’t just listen in via intercom) if this is what you are looking to have done then set “Intercom Override” to ring under “Other” in the extension settings.

Thank you, but that’s not what I am looking for.

I currently have intercom enabled on all extensions so I get how that works.

For example, this is what I would like to do:

  • All extensions intercom/auto answer enabled.
  • If my employee at EXT 200 calls my EXT 201, it will auto answer and intercom.
  • However if a guest uses the phone in the lobby (EXT202) and calls FROM EXT 202 to my EXT 201 it will ring.

It seems in the extension settings, you can only change if all internal calls coming to a specific extension will ring or intercom . I want to do the reverse; decide if an extension can place an intercom call to another extension.

This could be done with a ring group. Calls to ext 200 auto answer, but calls to 2001, a ring group of 200 only would ring until answered.

Awesome! Didn’t think of that! Thanks so much, I’ll have to try that.

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Just consider the security implications of setting up such auto answer functionality; if your PBX is connected to the world by a trunk and you have an IVR with extension dialling enabled, or a directory, VM failover destination etc., then whoever from the PSTN can reach your extension that way would be able to automatically hear and talk to your phone

AFAIK, those are internal auto answers, so it would only apply to internal calls.

there’s also an option to make all calls auto answer (even if they are not intercom calls) which would include all external calls so just be wary of that anyone who uses that option

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