Simultaneously ring 'n' calls on 'm' extensions in ring group strategy (feature?)

Hi, (wish there was a wishlist category on the forum, lacking that I post to GH)

currently I have 3 extensions as a ring-group destination. Their devices are a mix of Cisco SPA112 and SPA301, single-line only, and MicroSIP on computers acting as CID display.

If I set strategy to ‘ring all’, then if a call is ringing, another call will not find any extensions free to pass the ‘ringing’ to, leading eventually to the second call dropping through to providers VM.

Hunt strategy is better but only gives each operator a short window to pick it up [or maybe it’s lame because we haven’t mastered call pickup yet… ]

Memory hunt may be better in the sense that the window will be largest for the first operator in the ring group. It will however eventually block up all extensions as per strategy… which we fear will have similar effect to ‘ringall’ blocking. We are trying this out.

I wish there was some way to make the ring groups aware of ‘simultaneous ring’ situation without using IVR/Queues - here are my 2 potential ideas :

  • alternate simultaneous ringing/non-blocking ringall : when a second call wishes to starts to ring when first is not picked up yet, ring group should behave like ringall strategy for each call alternately : pass the ‘ringing’ to all available extensions, tell every originator that it’s ringing, first operator one to pick up will get the first call, second one will pick the second call etc; Only after exhausting capacity of available extensions (or timeout), the call is passed to the no ‘answer’ destination. Similar in operation to having calls queued, and then ringing the ring group, but WITHOUT the queue actually picking it up… and aware of number of available extensions too.

  • ringall with pool divide by ringing call count : when 1 call starts ringing, it rings all available extensions; if another call comes in requesting to ring, ring group divides the number of extensions by 2 and assigns first call to odd and the second to even pool; Third incoming call will divide the pool by 3 etc. Only after exhausting the whole pool (if num calls > num extensions) or after timeout occurs, the call is then passed to the ‘no answer’ destination.

This probably only makes sense for single-line dumb-phone users like myself… users of phones with more than 1 incoming line available will not need this… as would those where incoming call is shown on display and can be selected by operator.

Hope it would make sense enough :wink:
Lukasz

Isn’t this what call waiting is for?

How would you use CW in this situation then ? In general how would it help me ? Are there scenarios described somewhere? - I’m not afraid to look for / read more, if some hints / even google keywords are given. I have CW enabled on extension settings (well, I am on users&devices mode actually) just now :wink: