I maintain a pretty large freepbx server for a company that is always expanding. We have two types of callers, one main group that’s met with the same greeting and IVR menu and another group of proprietary programs where the greeting announcements and IVR’s are always changing. Is it possible to bypass creating a time condition for each inbound route? maybe couple them together and send them on their way according to the inbound number?
Additionally, is it possible to play a greeting to ALL calls that are on my system in the result of technical difficulties, or weather hazards that may have an affect on hold times etc?
This doesn’t seem like a question about time conditions, but a call about IVR announcements. Note that they are both parts of this, but the recordings part seems to be the least flexible.
The current audio recording system is pretty limited, in that most of the time, the recording you get is installed by someone for a specific reason. Once there, it can be selected as the intermediate destination for some activity, but the recordings themselves are relatively static.
The Calendar Module should give you some relief, but even then, it’s not going to give you a lot of flexibility when it comes to the recordings. There are other call flow controllers that you can experiment with (time conditions is just one of the three or four ways of controlling this).
I’m certain we can come up with some suggestions for handling what you are looking for, but looking for a stepwise refinement of the solution might be a good course. Which problem do you want to solve first?
Hello, I guess I may have explained this a little wrong.
the IVR’s themselves are not changing, but I’m constantly adding new ones that require different announcements. I was wondering if there was a way to bypass the creation of a new time condition each time a new program is added to the server. As of right now I have over 30 programs that require two time conditions for each program. ex: holiday hours, business hours.
You should be able to combine your “business hours” and “Holiday hours” time conditions into a single condition. Having said that, I understand the desire to have both - I’m just pointing out that you can combine them.
It sounds like you need to explote the new Calendar interface, which should make this all a lot easier for you. Have you looked at that yet?
No, I have not… but I will definitely look into this.
Touching on what you’re saying, is that I can use one time condition per program with holiday hours/business hours? Right now the way it works is the time condition checks if it’s a holiday, if it’s a holiday it plays a holiday recording. If it’s not a holiday it forwards it to the business hours time condition and checks if it’s within business hours and passes it to the IVR then on to the queue, if not it forwards it to an after hours IVR.
I’ve been holding out on updating from v13 to v14 because everything I’ve read said I have to basically start fresh. I’m currently working on setting up another box on v14 and I guess will test the calendar module then. We currently have a FreePBX Appliance 500 that I’m working on.
Ok, I’ve installed freepbx distro 14 onto our other box that I will be putting into production here soon. I’ve taken a good look at the calendar, and I’m not sure how this is going to resolve my request. I may be wrong, but before I would follow this structure.
Inbound route > time condition > IVR/Queue (with custom recordings for each created)
Would I add each proprietary program to a single calendar? if they all use different voice notifications?
I guess maybe I would set the calendar up to take place of a time group? and the time condition would then check the calendar to see if that program is operating on that time & date? such as
Inbound route > time condition (verifies against calendar instead of time groups) > if matched > IVR/Queue/Announcement (if unmatched > after hours recording?)
Sorry if I’m not very clear with what I’m trying to describe here, I’m a little confused.