What is the preferred method for handling users who have multiple phones? One user in particular has two desk phones (for different offices) and a softphone on his cell phone. Not knowing any better, I set each one up separately but they all now have their own separate usernames, voicemails, etc. What is the correct strategy for handling this situation?
There are a number of different approaches.
You can make the separate phones into a ring group, and make the ring group extension into his ‘official’ extension number – with voicemails, etc going to one place.
You might also want to set timed controls so that the cell phone doesn’t ring outside ‘business hours’ (or just let the user log out when they don’t want calls on their cell).
‘follow me’ is another option (that I haven’t used yet).
The real question is: what would you (ideally) like to see happen when a call comes in. Once you have the wish list, then you can plan your attack – including the scalability of the solution.
Just asking what to do is too open-ended of a question.
There is also (still in FreePBX 12) a mode called ‘Devices & Users’ which separate the two things.
Not sure there is a correct strategy but you do want to avoid device & user, it is not well supported by FreePBX. What I’ve done that works, is to choose one extension to be the main extension set to the main extension number. All other supplemental extensions are added to the follow-me of the main extension with failover to main extension’s voicemail. Set the CID Num Alias for the supplemental extensions to match the main extension so that all calls appear to come from the same phone number. User must be instructed not to disable follow-me.
If you want to set hints so that the main extension appears to be busy when any extension is in use, use the technique here:
That’s interesting… since it doesn’t match my usage (i.e. it seems to be doing what /I/ need of it in my case). Can (!) you elaborate or point to some resources/links about d&u being not well supported, please 
?
EDIT:
so I googled, and found this; and this.
But I run in chan_sip and probably will until I have to migrate to FreePBX with Asterisk >12 (where pjsip will be default and “is the answer to my problems”)… I sincerely hope FreePBX team can make up a path of migration for users like me 
meaning FROM D&U to Extensions mode even semi-automatically.
Very first google result (which hasn’t been touched in 12 months):
http://wiki.freepbx.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=5242941
User & Device mode is only recommended for Advanced users. Many parts of FreePBX do not support this mode.
Tyop fixed
Yeah that page appeared in google results too.
Also there seem to be mentions of Bulk Extensions not working with d&u. And some with dynamically logging in users. Well hello there, these are call center mass convenience/setup/everyday features, not much relevant in my use case, where I have 10 extensions total and shake every one’s hand every day… I sincerely hope FreePBX will have an equivalent and supported mode to which I can migrate, even semi-automatically, when time comes… otherwise I just won’t.