I know that Unity is not the favoured ACD solution from Cisco but I have a customer who uses Unity and has a requirement for calls to be queued to a helpdesk with four agents. They do not need reporting, supervisor monitoring and everything else that IPCC Express offers and do not want to spend alot of money.
Using Unity as a "poor man's hunt group" is detailed in the document at the URL below.
http://www.ciscounitytools.com/Applications/Audio%20Text%20Applications%20in%20Unity.doc
I have copied the relevant section below:
In some scenarios it’s handy to be able to try a series of extensions until you find one that’s not busy. For instance a group of extensions for handling incoming sales or support calls. Normally this is best done by the phone switch itself which will most often have more sophisticated and cost effective methods of handling large numbers of calls waiting to find an open extension than Unity has at it’s disposal. However, in the case where Unity is running behind a switch without such capabilities or for small scale needs where the call is not going to end up parking on a port in Unity should a line not be available it may make sense to have Unity do the “hunting” for you here.
To do this in Unity you’ll want to take advantage of the “blank” greeting option which is provided for fast call routing scenarios just like this. Lets say you want to have Unity try to find an open extension between 4001 and 4009 and if none of the extensions are available, send the caller to an interview handler and collect the callers’ information for later call back. To do that, follow these steps:
• First, create 10 call handlers and configure their alternate transfer rules to be active and have them configured to do a supervised transfer to extensions 4000 through 4009 respectively. You do not need to assign extensions to these call handlers if you don’t want to, it’s only necessary to configure the transfer rules properly to get Unity to try the phones you want here. Depending on how you’re routing callers to this “hunt group” it’s probably a good idea not to assign extensions to these handlers if you can help it. Note that this scenario assumes that if an extension is not busy that someone will be there to answer it so if you have agents in this group have them be sure to take their extension out of service with a DND setting or the like so the switch will return busy when we try the extension.
So my question again. Is there any way to make an extension busy on a CM 3.3.3 system, i.e. DND, using 7940 phones so that I can use Unity as described above?
