CUCM forward all phones to a recording

[Collin78076]

Hello Everyone,

I have just had a request dumped on me to route all of our phones to a recorded message for 5 minutes tomorrow afternoon. The owner does not want ANY phones to ring during that time period. This includes internal and external phone calls.

We are running CUCM 11.5 on prem. We have about 15 remote sites, each with its own partition with different H.323 gateways and multiple PRI's routing to our main CUCM cluster (SRST is also configured so just disconnecting the server won't work). Does anyone have any idea how to go about setting something like this up? Please let me know if there is any more information I need to provide.

[Jaime Valencia · Accepted solution]

If you have CUC, you'd need to send all the calls to VM, create a routing rule to get all the calls, and then play the message and hang up the call. If there is no VM, setting, you'd need to create translation patterns in CUCM or translation rules in the GWs to send to the call handler with the message.

If you don't have CUC, then your only option would be to use queuing in the hunt group to play the message.

But it all requires you to modify a LOT of call routing for that to work, and then revert all the changes.

You could also possibly create a TCL script in the GW to play the message and modify the config so it is used, but you'd need to do this on every GW.

[Collin78076]

Hey Jaime, thank you for the reply. Just an FYI I am fairly new to CUCM but we do have CUC.

Are you referring to a routing rule in CUCM or CUC? If you are talking about a forward routing rule in CUC, the phones would still ring. If you are talking about CUCM, how would I create a routing rule that would force all calls to a specific VM? 

[Collin78076 · Accepted solution]

I scrapped the idea of forwarding internal calls and just created something to grab all of the incoming calls only. What I did was create a new partition, added all of the GW CSS's to that partition, then created a translation rule with a match all "!" and forwarded/translated that to a CTI port going to my call handler. Turns out it works exactly as I was hoping.