Hiding extensions from Outside world

[PPecullan]

I have some subscribers which I don't want to be reached from outside the company. Essentially the only way I want their phone to ring is if the call was made internally or was transfered to them from someone in our office. <br><br>I know that a subscriber can be removed from the directory; however, if someone knows their extension they can still dial it and reach them. <br><br>Is it possible to what I am proposing?<br><br>

[#2]

There's no easy way in Unity to prevent someone from dialing an extension that's defined for a subscriber or call handler in the system if the user knows the ID.

Why don't you just turn auto attendant transfers off? Is it that you don't want folks calling them or you don't want folks leaving them messages? If you turn off transfer from within Unity for these folks only internal callers can dial that person's phone. Outside callers can dial their ID from the opening greeting but will only get the subscriber's greeting and leave them a message, it'll never ring the phone.

Unless I'm missing what you're trying to do here?


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect
Active Voice
jlindborg@activevoice.com
http://members.home.net/jlindborg

[PPecullan]

Hmmm, I really don't want them to get messages either.

This is for our technical support department. We always have a call coordinator and work off a strict call queue. Our customers somehow get the extensions of our tech support people and call them directly.

This causes 3 problems:
1. The technicians are no longer taking the calls out of the queue in the order they should.
2. If a technician is out for the day and a customer leaves a message for that technician the customer will not get helped until the tech comes in again.
3. We no longer have a central point of contact for calls to come in.

If a customer needs to speak with a particualr tech we want the call coordinator to get the call and transfer it.

[#4]

Interesting problem...

Well, if I were to do this, I'd make sure that the number outside callers accessed took them to a call handler or handlers that were locked down such that they couldn't dial extensions at all (i.e. they can only select one key routing options and the like) or could not dial extensions starting with specific numbers. Not allowing them to dial any extensions directly is easy... there's a check box for this on the call handler pages.

If you still want them to be able to dial SOME people just not your support folks and all your support folks happen to have extensions that started with 4 or 5 for example, I'd have the opening greeting locked down such that users could not dial 4 or 5... they could dial extensions that started with other digits but not those.

You could get fancy with routing rules here and have a "familiy and friends" back door that used a different trunk number that routed to a different call handler than the opening greeting or something.

If this approach isn't feasible, I can't think of any other really clean way of doing this. If you have a real tight switch integration you MIGHT be able to setup your tech's internal greetings to allow messages but their standard/off hours greetings to not take messages. This way internal folks could get messages to these guys buy folks calling from the outside couldn't. This would be tough, though, if the switch didn't provide good info on the call origin.


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect
Active Voice
jlindborg@activevoice.com
http://members.home.net/jlindborg

[#5]

You could setup the transfer settings for people in your technical support department to transfer to the call coordinator. This will probably do what you want.

Aaron Belcher
Software Engineer
Active Voice
abelcher@activevoice.com