In this case users are separate than extensions. You can have a user in User Manager that just has access to view and manage extensions and not have one themselves. You can create users and then link them to an extension. You can create an extension that is not linked to a user.
User Manager is for the UCP/Contacts, etc. It doesn’t have a direct relationship with extensions outside of the system automatically creating a user based on the extension number by default.
IMO, multiple devices on the same extension rarely results in good workflow. My setup is similar to yours. When I’m at the office, I don’t want calls ringing at home, disturbing my wife who may be sleeping. I don’t want the mobile ringing, either. Using a push-based app (anything else results in the battery not lasting all day), it can take a second or two for the cancel to propagate, so the caller would hear the mobile ringing when I answer.
I have call waiting enabled so I can answer an important caller while on another call. Often, I ignore it and don’t want the mobile ringing obnoxiously while waiting for the second call to go to voicemail.
Accurate CDRs are important to me – they should show which device made or took a call.
Instead, my office phone is the primary extension, with Follow Me set to ring other devices after a few seconds delay. It’s not perfect, but most calls are answered quickly and the other devices don’t ring. For call waiting, the system knows that the office phone is in use and is smart enough not to ring the other devices.
You didn’t mention how the office soft phone is used. I assume that no one talks on it and it’s there for CRM popups, logging, click-to-call or similar. In that case, having it share the office phone extension makes sense.
You raised some good points, thank you.
So far the multiple location ringing is not an issue however this could change at any time.
You mentioned call waiting - I cannot say if we have that or not. I have not personally experienced a second call coming in while on another call. Is this a setting in FreePBX, or is this a function of out trunking provider?
CDRs - Also good point and one that I will keep an eye on. This is a sort of multi-tenant installation but all the companies belong to the same holding company. Right now it is relatively easy to track the calls for each phone number (company) at the trunking provider but down the road someone may want to see more detailed information and we will have to have a discussion about the extension configuration.
Your follow me suggestion is more or less what we had with ring groups also setup. What we didn’t have was a single voicemail setup as @AdHominem suggested previously so we had many extensions with their own voicemail and it was a mess. Right now everyone is happy and thanks to @BlazeStudios suggestion to turn MWI Type to unsolicited we are having the most accurate voicemail waiting we have ever had. I never thought we would get all these different phones working this well together. I setup a Cisco 8841, Cisco SPA504, Digium A30 and Digium D65 on my desk to test and although there is typically a lag of a minute or two they all light up their message indicators at the same time and they also extinguish them when any of the extensions listens to the message. Beautiful.
You know what, I am not sure how the desktop soft phones are being used. From what I can tell they are used as glorified speaker phones. We looked at hooking up some CRM but the CRM we use (SuiteCRM) may not be getting used enough to justify the cost of the commercial plugin needed to connect FreePBX to it.
One feature that we want, and I will probably make a new topic for this, is contact management. We only have a few contacts setup under Admin | Asterisk Phonebook but I have not figured out how to view these contacts on the phones. Getting contacts / phone book on the phones would be a great feature for us.
Having multiple devices on extensions works well. What he was saying is the workflow does not work for him.
That has nothing to do with the technical functionality.
Opposed to his view, I have my extension on 3 devices and a soft phone. The soft phone is almost never used but the three devices ring all the time and there are no issues with it.
But my devices are not in my house. well one is my home office, but that is not family living space and it doesn’t bother anyone if something in there makes noise, we cannot hear it.
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