Managing Ring Delays - Queues vs Ring Groups vs Hybrid Approach vs?

[tomgriffin]

I am looking for recommendations/best practices for managing the main line of a small business. Specifically, my question deals with how best to delay ringing certain groups of extensions.

I have four things I’m trying to achieve with this configuration:

1. A predefined map of extensions should define the initial extensions to ring, followed by an expanded set of extensions if there is no answer from one of the “first responder” devices, followed by an expanded set of extensions if there is no answer from the first two groups (three tiers).
2. Any device should be able to see that there is an incoming call on the main line via a BLF indicator.
3. Any device should be able to pickup the call.
4. Queue reports and hold music should be supported.

My hypothesis was to use a combination of queues and ring groups, with the ring group hierarchy codified in the “destination if no answer” settings of each ring group. This is the model I came up with:

The main issue with this approach is the delay as the call is routed from ring group to ring group. I’m trying to create a configuration where extensions are added to those already ringing.

Define Ring Groups as Agents?

I’ve also gamed out the scenario where I define the ring groups as agents and then set the ring strategy to linear (which as I understand, will ring in the order in which they’re input into the FreePBX GUI).

The only limitation compared to the aforementioned approach (again, if I understand right) is that I would not be able to vary the durations - I’d have to set a single duration value for the Agent Timeout to determine when to expand the pool of ringing devices.

That said…I’m guessing I’ll run into a similar issue with the delay between expanding the pool of ringing devices…

Any ideas?

[sorvani (Jared Busch)]

What delay?
Failing to the next destination is transparent.

Ring groups failing to ring groups is exactly how I do it.

You should also think about changing you ring times to match the ring cycle of your country. Assuming North America, a ring cycle is ~2 seconds ring and ~4 seconds silence. So a 10 second time will likely sound weird.

[BlazeStudios (Tom Ray)]

You should not be using Ring Groups as “Agents” on a Queue. I know this has been covered in other posts on this forum but “Ring Groups” are not a real thing, it is a method in which to call a group of devices at the same time or in a particular order. Follow-Me is a “ring group” in that regard.

Due to this a Ring Group does not have a state and it cannot be monitored in any form by a Queue for such. More importantly, how would Queue Reporting even tell you anything if the Queue is treating the Ring Group as an Agent. How will you know what actually happened since it won’t tell you anything about the actual devices you are trying to monitor.

Basically you can’t do in this a combo. Send all the calls to your Ring Groups and failover based on that. That means no Queue reports because really nothing you are doing calls for Queues and it would make things more complicated and deal with that. Because that is the only way a call is going to be able to be picked up and “stolen” by another user during this entire process.