Door access - integrated into phone

[Nathan Farrar]

Looking for input on a solution to the following:

Have a access control system with multiple entry points. A door station at each. Person presses door call button (which interacts with CUCM via an ATA device) and a hunt group is dialed. Users can see "Door Station" on phone as this is the name of the hunt group. In order to speak with the person at the door, the user would pick up the phone and dial any key in order to initiate two way communication. If the user wants to open the door that the person called from, they dial #61. All works fine

What are options to automate this a bit? I'd like to have a button that is displayed during the call which will speed dial the #61 for the user. I'm not sure how to add this.

Also, is there a way to automatically press a key (any key) when a user picks up a call going to this call group? I'm looking to remove the users need to press any key to initiate the two way conversation and give them a quick key on the phone that will dial #61 while they are in the call to open the door.

Any thoughts are much appreciated!

[Jaime Valencia]

When you're on a call, those are sent as DTMFs, the other end of the call, would need to be able to understand them and react to them. As this is just a call from an ATA to an IP Phone, I don't see how you would do this.

I would double check what you actually have configured, if the call is directed to a hunt pilot, you don't have to press absolutely nothing to answer the call, you just pickup the handset.

[Nathan Farrar]

It's not the phone system that wants the "dial something" portion of this. It's the access control system.

So, a person presses the call button at the door station. This is analog and goes to an ATA. The ATA is set to call the hunt group. Once the phone is answered, the connection is established with the ATA BUT the access system (For some odd reason) requires that you press a key before it will then connect the call to the door station directly. It isn't anything to do with the phone system and is kinda annoying. I think the reasoning is that you can have several doors calling the same number, I think the mfg of the access control system uses this to differentiate somehow.

So I guess the question is really, can we emulate dialed digits somehow during a call? Everything works (with the pressing a key to get audio from the door station and pressing #61 to tell the access control system to open the door) I would just like to take some of the steps away. Seems we can't dial '#61' from some kind of button during a call?

[Jaime Valencia]

OK, I thought this was just a regular call from the ATA to an IP Phone, but if your access control system is in between, all of your questions should be directed to them, in the end, it's not the phones the ones telling you to dial something to get audio.

While you're on a call, CUCM and the phones can only send the DTMFs as they would do with any other system in which you would dial and get any kind of IVR, whether you access control system can do something with those, is up to the system itself.

And you cannot configure a button to send DTMFs during a call.