Send External Caller to External Cell Phone... how to do it?

[DNGT]

Okay, we just moved over from an old Digium Switchvox to freePBX. Something that was set up before was dialing an extension to reach an employee’s cell phone. This was possible even when calling in through the main company IVR.

For example, cell phone A calls company IVR tree, dials 302, call gets forwarded to person B’s cell phone number.

This was super simple in Digium using the “Send to External Number” option in the IVRs.

I’ve scoured the internet for a similar solution for FreePBX and haven’t been able to replicate it completely the way we want.
The requirements are as stated above and in addition:

• CID is the external (original) caller’s number (not our office number)
• Voicemail ends up at the recipients’ phone voice mail box (not their office mailbox)

Here’s what I’ve found so far (which are almost solutions, but not quite):

• Virtual Extension with FMFM - (Works, but uses the office voicemail instead of cell phone)

• Ring Groups - (Works, but shows CID as our office, not the external caller’s cell number)

• Custom Destinations (from-internal,XXXXXXXXXX,1) - (Works great, except if it’s an external caller it just fails)

• Misc Destination - (Doesn’t seem to work to actually forward to external numbers. I’ve tried with “#” prepended and without)

These solutions have been close, just not quite the exact parameters we’re looking for.
Anyone have any thoughts on how to accomplish this?

[comtech]

@DNGT

Virtual Extension with FMFM - (Works, but uses the office voicemail instead of cell phone)

This is the answer if you want more functionality (queues, extension reporting, etc.) in the future. Just disable office voicemail for the extension or change the ring time to be longer, triggering their cell voicemail before it has a chance to time out to office vm.

If you don’t care about anything other than getting the call to the cell, misc. destinations are likely best. There is less setup than an extension, no VM to deal with, and you limit an attach vector by not creating an extension that you can register against. Misc destination is almost always for external call use cases, you’d have to provide a call log to help troubleshoot why it does not work for you. You don’t need a # for misc destinations.