Theoretical question here. Been using FreePBX for awhile now, and our organization is very happy with it. Have a recent change at one of our retail site locations. Previously the salespeople all had dedicated desks. With PC’s and SIP desk phones. But the site underwent a major remodel. And now the salespeople don’t have those perks. No PC and no SIP desk phone. So we issued all of them MDM company iPhones. Between the phone apps and calling/texting, that’s their primary link to work now.
Our receptionists use FOP2. So transferring callers to their desk phones worked fine. Now I added Find Me/Follow Me entries, so that their offline extensions will then ring their cell phones. That works fine. The receptionist can just use FOP2 to transfer to their extension and the caller is passed along as needed.
My question is if we could just skip the whole phantom extension mechanism. Would be some efficiencies that would be possible? The key component involves transferring callers from the receptionist’s SIP extension to maybe 10-20 possible cell phones. Preferably using FOP2.
I would go with something like IP softphones for the iPhones where the phones have an actual extension on the system. Products like the ClearlyIP softphone, Acrobits Groundwire softphone or Sangoma softphone could do it for you.
Thanks for the reply. I was thinking about that as an option. Our salespeople are rather tech challenged, so toggling between a SIP soft phone app and their basic carrier phone ops might be a stretch.
One of the reasons I’m looking to ditch all of the FreePBX extensions is we will likely be adding a fair amount of new site locations in the near future. Currently I have our four site locations all residing within the central FreePBX. Future expansion would likely need me to move from three digit extensions to four, revising our dial plans some, etc. Having lots of offline extensions probably doesn’t task the system as much as having lots of active online extensions I guess…
It’s different work the other way, but you could set focus modes since you mentioned iPhones. You could program a mode that automatically turns it on/off based on date, time, and/or location. You also could use the freepbx calendaring. All of this adds weight however.
I tend to concur with the app approach. Most of the SIP clients have presence awareness that would allow users to turn things on and off.
Appreciate the replies! I think I will probably just stick with the extensions → cell phone FM/FM scenario I suppose. The majority of our inbound main DID calls are parked for any salesperson to pick up. That would lend itself better for the SIP app angle, but the site should have a decent handful of shared desk phones for picking those up. Thanks again!
Been using FreePBX for awhile now, and our organization is very happy with it. Have a recent change at one of our retail site locations. Previously the salespeople all had dedicated desks. With PC’s and SIP desk phones. But the site underwent a major remodel. And now the salespeople don’t have those perks. No PC and no SIP desk phone. So we issued all of them MDM company iPhones. Between the phone apps and calling/texting, that’s their primary link to work now.