Hi! I’m a bit of a noob so I apologize in advance.
I’ve set up a handful of FreePBX phone systems via SIP trunking with various features but there’s one thing I haven’t figured out yet.
On traditional analogue phones, they have various line appearances. Say, lines 1-8 which are all actual individual phone lines. An employee can answer line 1, put them on hold, answer line 4, finish that call and then pick up line 1 again.
I haven’t figured out how to do this with FreePBX and Sangoma phones. You don’t seem to need multiple DIDs to accept multiple calls. How do I configure the system so employees can do this? If you put someone on hold, there doesn’t seem to be a way to answer a second call, end the call and pick up the person on hold so far as I know. That is, unless I’m missing something. The line appearances are replaced with extensions for other employees or departments. What do?
Another side question: When a cell phone is part of a call group, the caller ID only shows the business name. Is there any way to pass through the name and number of the person that’s actually calling? If someone misses the call outside of business hours, they have no way to call them back because they don’t know who it was.
Your talking about what’s called a key system which FreePBX doesn’t support. You can achieve something similar using call parking. Create a parking lot with the number of slots (Lines) you want. Assuming your using the default lot of 70, create a key with type of speed dial (Or maybe DTMF…it’s been a while since I configured) and assign value of ##70#. Label the key Park Call. Create several BLF key’s for the phones using the Parking slots as the value (71, 72, 73, etc.) and label them Pickup 71, Pickup 72, PIckup 73, etc. This would be the equivalent of your line keys. When a call comes in press the park call key. You should get an announcement that the call is parked in slot 71 and the BLF light for the corresponding key should light up on all phones that have that key programmed. If you park another call while the first call is parked the call will be parked in slot 72 and that key will also be lit and so on. You can now page or call and let the user know they have a call parked on 71 or 72. They can pick up by simply pressing the corresponding lit key. You may also be able to transfer directly to the parking slot by pressing the transfer key and then the slot you want to park the call. You may also want to check out Sangoma’s Parking App which is part of the Phone Apps module.
There has been various discussions over the years about this https://community.freepbx.org/search?q=shared%20line%20appearance @tm1000 had even done some PoC stuff. In general the guidance has been retrain your users to do it a better way. If you go through those search results you will probably find good info.