Unity Call Screening

[pieter.bos]

In Unity (all versions) you have the posibility to do call screening. Unity will take the call, ask who is calling, the ring the phone, tell the called party who is calling and give him the choice to take the call or send it to voicemail.

I am able to make this work when I call Unity's extention and then call a subscriber from within Unity.

I would like to know how I can make this the default behaviour when calling the IP phone directly. This feature is not of much use if you have to always call Unity first and then call the extention to make call screening work.

[emlee]

Unity, in my opinion, is really geared around having Unity front end all calls... rather than a receptionist.

But to get Unity to ask for callers name, there is a way. I did this once, by setting up my DID as a call handler, and setting it up for "screening". Then I had Unity transfer the call to an "internal" only extension on my phone.

[pieter.bos]

Yes, that is possibly a way to get it working, but it is not a very profesional or scaleable way. It will mean you will use 2 lines on your phone. It also has a lot of extra administration. I am sure when Unity was designed they had another way in handling this, even if it was with a tranditional PBX. Any other ideas?

[Markus Schneider]

When you say you want this to be the default behavior when calling the IP phone directly, do you mean from outbound calls, or also any IP phone-to-IP phone calls? If it were just calls from the outside, you could translate the inbound call to the Unity pilot number, but then the user would need to call the extension again. There's not really any other way to do this, but I'd like to understand the functionality you're looking for.

[pieter.bos]

Only outside calls will be a very good start. The translation part I have already set up, but not exactly what I am looking for. I am sure it is possible. I think I once reached Unity in this way when I called a Cisco SE directly. Cant remember which country. It is also working at Interstar (The company that created Lightining Fax, that was earlier bundeled with Unity)

That means I call the direct number of the person I want to reach. Unity answers always and prompt me for my name. And the rest of the flow you probably know.