Hands free intercom in CM 3.2

[mreilly]

I am using 3.1(3A) version of call manager the customer has heard about the hands free intercom function available with 3.2. Could someone tell me how this works? (IE is this a service).

[dtessari]

The feature you describe is called auto answer and is available in ver. 3.1

The significant enhancement to this feature found in 3.2 is that auto-answer is programmable per line on the instrument.

Basically auto answer permits the speaker to be opened for an intercom call without human intervention on the part of the receiving party. If you want more detailed information please let me know.

From what I understand there will be a psuedo paging capability added vian an XML application in ver. 3.3. There is some speculation that 3.3 might be ready for beta before 3.2 becomed GA.

[paul.harrison]

This feature is NOT the same in 3.1 and 3.2.

3.1 ONLY answers to a headset, you can NOT make the phone answer to speaker phone.

3.2 allows you to answer to speakerphone, though not to a shared line on multiple instruments.

Paul

[blcase]

Is it not also true that this feature will be for both internal & external calls? Other than using seperate DN's just for intercom, is there a way to tell CM to limit this to just internal callers only? Turning on this "autoanswer" feature seems kind of dangerous, having a call come in and just go off hook allowing the calling party to hear everything. I looked at this in the last install I did, (although I didn't have a lot of time to test it) the phone would ring once and immediately go off hook, for internal and external callers. The customer hated that and ended up not using it. I'm interested to hear how others are using this and if there are other settings that I'm missing.

Brent

[mimckee]

To my knowledge there is no way to distingush between internal and external callers. Basically you in 3.2 of callmanager you can turn it on for headset or speakerphone and it is per line. So if someone calls that line it will auto-answer if you told it to. The default is 1 ring there is a service parameter that you can mofiy to make this longer.

Hope this helps,

-Mckee

[martin.jefferson]

Paul, do you know if Cisco has allowed auto anaswer on shared lines yet?

[mtashiro]

We use it in the following way:

Each users only has one line so we assigned the second line on the 7940's and 7960's to another number similar to their primary line (eg, primary 1010, intercom 2010).

Anyone can call the second line and it will connect as a intercom call. We do not allow external calls to transfer to intercom extensions. Only bad thing is this does not work on shared lines as someone else already mentioned. Maybe someday.

Not ideal but it does work.

[irlitewave]

What I did for this is to have a 3rd DN in a partition and CSS only availible to the users who want to intercom between. It seems to work fine and is not accessable from the outside.

[gaurban]

I'm not sure if you are talking about the feature of autoanswer. This is a setting you enable on one of the lines on the phone that it automatically answers a call and puts it either on the speaker, handset or headset. We set this up for our secondary lines so that we can call the second number, and if the person is not on the phone, it automatically picks up the call and you can talk through the speaker phone - works really well actually.

Hope this helps.

Gerri