Hi,
I've been talking about configuring this in a key mode and hadn't tried it yet... until now. I didn't realize you can only set up shared lines with FXO ports. As I've mentioned before, I think we'll run into a substantial percentage of clients that will want a key type system and it'd be nice to have the capability to use SIP instead of POTS. That said, if I understand shared lines and shared extensions correctly, I believe it would be easy enough to accomplish the same effect using shared extensions, BUT the system doesn't differentiate between "busy" and "no answer," it simply gives me the option for "call forward busy/no answer." What this means is even if we set up the hunt group to try to emulate KEY with SIP, it will only work half the time: if the first shared extension is busy, it'd roll over to the next extension in the hunt group, but it will also keep hunting even if nobody answers meaning it could possibly cycle through 4 (for example) lines before ever going to the VM or AA. Also, the personal line burns up one button so you always need n+1 buttons where n=number of lines in the key mode. Coming from CME world, we'd overlay it and be done. And last, I don't see a way to change the number of calls a button can handle, looks like I'm stuck with 2. So...
1) We'd like to see shared lines available with SIP.
2) It would be great to split call-forward busy away from call-forward no-answer so they can have different behaviors.
3) It would be nice to overlay shared lines/extensions on the personal line so as to not burn off one button.
4) We'd like the option of changing how many calls a button can support. In CME lingo, I'm talking about changing it from a dual-line dn to a single-line dn. This way we can set whether a caller has to wait x number of rings before VM or AA if that called user is on the line already. It'd be preferable for this to be a per-user or per-extension setting rather than global. Maybe this is already possible and I missed it.
If anyone reading this has some sort of workaround idea with SIP to emulate KEY mode (short of a SIP to POTS gateway), I'm all ears.
We're going to try to deploy a market trial one here real soon, so I may have lots more to say...
Thanks!
-Danny
