We will have 2 separate DIDs for 2 companies running off same PBXact. Each is routed to a separate Queue and i want to have two Buttons that ring/light up according to the inbound queue. So, if queue 1 rings, i want a button called ‘company 1’ (or ‘company 2’ if queue 2 rings) to sound and light up so the receptionist knows what company they are answering for. I realize i can prepend a label to caller Id but i would like to have a more visual way (i.e. separate phone buttons) of identifying the inbound call queues.
Tried this using virtual extensions and blf but that doesn’t seem to work. Do we have to burn separate SIP accounts for each queue on all the receptionist phones we want to use this on? We have 3 receptionist S505 phones - id hate to think we have to burn 6 SIP accounts just to make this work.
I would set up each phone with two separate extensions. That way, outbound calls will show the correct company’s caller ID, whether made manually (by pushing the appropriate line button), or returned from history or contacts. I see no disadvantage to setting up the extra extensions.
thats what we ended up doing but in our case it was 3 extensions each phone because each receptionist has to have their own line as well. The disadvantage is we burn 9 licenses instead of 3. Could become a problem as we only have 25 licenses. Thats why we wanted to leverage Virtual extensions instead of SIP accounts. Thanks for your response.
You have two DIDs, presumably going to one ITSP. That’s all the SIP “accounts” you need. If set up with a reputable ITSP, that should actually only be the one SIP account you need.
Your extensions (and buttons, if you set it up that way) are just extensions. You’d need them for ring groups anyway, so just assign two extensions per phone and put them into the two ring groups. It’s all the same SIP account (in the local network), so it’s not like it’s going to cost anything.
The last time I set one of these up, Company “1” was 2xx and Company “B” was 3xx. You can have literally as many extensions as you want, there’s no practical limit (except bandwidth and CPU power). If you had a lot of extensions, you would just go to 4-digit extension numbers. There are a thousand schemes you can use - 3-digit ring groups and queues and 4-digit extensions, or vice versa. The burden of the system is its flexibility, which is also its strength.
Maybe i am misunderstanding - im still new at this - but PBXact requires a license for every extension (chan_SIP) even if its assigned to the same SIP account. So, three extensions = three licenses (per phone) unless thre was a way to work this with Virtual Extensions which i havent figured out.