My friend’s AVAYA IP Office PBX systems has feature called “Mobile Twinning”, this feature allows an external phone to be twinned with internal extension. the twinned device can be any external phone such as mobile or home phone.
so when caller rings the extension, both extension and the twinned device will ring. if the call is not answered from either device then the call will follow the rules set up for the extension. (such as being redirected to voicemail)…
Hi,
its different with Follow-Me feature…
this nice AVAYA key feature is to ring parallel extensions…
for example…
ext. 100 and the cellphone in parallel ring for 60 seconds, if the call was not picked up in 60 seconds then the caller will be redirected to the voicemail.
my friend also told me that in AVAYA he can easily turn on / off and play with the Mobile Twinning:
to turn Mobile Twinning on:
From his extension no., he just dial *90#.
From another extension, dial 90N#. Where N is the extension for which he want
to turn on mobile twinning
To turn Mobile Twinning off:
• From his own extension, dial *91#.
• From another extension, dial 91N#. Where N is the extension for which he want
to turn off mobile twinning
To enter a number to be Twinned to:
• From his own extension, dial 92M#. Where M is the number to be twinned to.
• From another extension, dial 92N*M#.
To pickup a Mobile Twinning call:
• Dial *93.
its really great to have this nice feature on my asterisk box… hmmm
Ring Groups? Device and User mode? Both would work here, but it doesn’t give you all of the features of a true twinning set up. You can’t dynamically control the twinned extension. You can transfer from the mobile, if you set up your trunk options properly.
Mitel also has a nice twinning function that I have tried to emulate many times. I can get close to the functionality, but not perfect.
I suspect that the Dev. Team could program such a feature relatively easily, but I don’t know of any analogous feature in FreePBX.
You can use Follow-me, Rings Groups, or Queues to obtain most of this functionality. As a far as remotely changing the number of the twinned external phone, you could do this using the ARI web-interface (which is a user interface), but it only works via web. You could also activate and deactivate follow-me using a feature code by dialing into a DISA. But, I don’t know of any way to change the phone # of the twinned phone remotely using DTMF.
If you just wanted to forward calls made to your extension to a remote # that you could program on the fly, that could be done remotely using the DISA Module, and the call forwarding feature code, but activating the required feature code will allow any user to forward any call to any extension to any other extension. Also, activating the call forwarding feature would stop calls from ringing at forwarded extension at all.
By “Following Me” with an outside line, remember you will tie up 2 call paths to your call provider ( the incoming call will take one line, and the cell call will take a 2nd). With that said, I have tested it recently going up against an Avaya bid… if you answer the call on your cell, you can, just like Avaya and Mitel, forward the call back to your desk phone… (*2exten) works great, and drops the 2nd outside line, and transfers to exten… also, if you answer the call at your desk, you can *2cellnumber# to pickup an outside line, and forward to your cell. At this point, if the call to the cell comes from the PBX, you can forward to any Exten, with *2exten.
It works great, and if you want you can set a soft key on the desk phone for the *2cellnumber forward, as a “Handoff” key.
There is one more option, and that is to put a sip softphone on the Adroid/Iphone, and register over 3/4G or wireless… and follow me to the softphone extension. That will save you an outbound line, but if you switch from 3G to 4G, or lose any data connection, your phone call suffers the same fate… gone like the wind.