Ring groups follow me privacy manager

General Help
1

ok, This is what i am trying to accomplish with little success…

inbound number rings 4 different cell phones for after hours emergency calls.
sounds easy… but, it isn’t.

I can easily get an inbound number to ring 4 cell phones. heres the problem, the cell phones all have voicemail. and i only want a real person to answer on the cells. I tried setting up inbound number to goto a ring group with privacy manager. and all the phones would ring but the privacy manager wouldn’t take a name at the start of the call.
so, i though i’d try using follow me. and, it works. but, the problem still lies in that if one of the cell phones goes to its own voicemail the other phones stop ringing because freepbx sais “one of the phones has been aswered” it would be nice if freepbx didn’t assume it was answered untill the user presses 1 on the cell phone to get around the voicemail problem.

any ideas? help would be greatly appriciated. iv been researching on how to do this for many hours now.

2

Enable ‘confirm calls’ option on the ring group.

3

Enable ‘confirm calls’ option on the ring group.
Yes, iv tried this and it doesn’t work with the ring group.
it does however work with a virtual extention, with Custom Devices added to the follow me settings.
However, when all the cell phones ring, as soon as one “answers” even if it is just the cells voicemail, the other phones stop ringing.
is there a way to make it not think the call has been answered untill the person on the cell has pressed 1 to accept the call?
i feer i may have to do some recoding… and i am not sure i could do that.

4

any sugestions anyone?

5

A call is either answered or it’s not. There’s no way the PBX can tell that it was answered by voicemail. I have a couple of suggestions.

  1. Enable ‘confirm calls’ as previously mentioned. That is supposed to request the end user presses ‘1’ to take the call, which voice mail will not do, therefore the call will be treated as unanswered.

  2. Use a queue instead of a ring group, and set the agent ring time to less than the mobile operator’s voicemail timeout. You can use ‘ringall’ ring strategy to ring all the mobile phones together.