Bad bug: transfer outside calls to paging, holds system hostage!

[tracy]

I've been doing UC500's for 6 years, and I never knew about this bug until a large client of mine experienced it not once, but twice. I have recreated the problem on my UC560 as well. Here's what happens:

1. Outside call comes in.

2. Staff answers the phone, but instead of hitting the softkey "Park" they hit the speed dial "Page".

3. Staff member hits the transfer softkey

Now the outside caller is on the overhead page to all phones, with no way to reach them to reconnect or disconnect! While paging is active, staff cannot use their phones!! All handsets are tied up by the paging system. The first time this happened, the caller hung up after a minute. The second time it happened, the caller yelled to the kids in the background, said some choice curse words, and finally hung up after 2 minutes.

I recreated this problem, but have not found a way to retrieve the call and disconnect it. Any suggestions?? Any way to stop it from happening in the first place??

thanks!

tracy

[danplacek]

I think this is more or less by design as it is desireable to be able to transfer someone to the paging system from either an incoming call or say an auto attendant. (at least, we have gotten this request from clients)

The best advice I can give you is to remove the "Page" key from anyone who can't seem to use their phone without mashing buttons randomly.

-Dan

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[tracy]

The client is a surgery center, they park and page all the time, and most handsets are used by multiple staff members.

However, I fail to see how an outside call that can hold the system hostage via page could possibly be a feature..at least if its an internal call you can find that extension and hang it up..

[danplacek]

Well of course it depends on the client... some really do want to be able to transfer an external call to the paging. In any case, you can hang up an incoming page to "get your phone back"... though I doubt this really helps you.

The only possible workaround for your scenario that I can think of would be messing with the transfer-pattern's in CLI (under telephony-service -- see the "Cisco CME Administration Guide") to block transfers to the paging extensions.

-Dan

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[tracy]

We did some testing and research and found that transfer patterns only apply to transfers going outside of the system. So any transfers that are done by an internal extension are excluded from the transfer patterns.

The only way I know to hang up an outside call that has control of paging is to pull the PRI cable from the system.

Any other suggestions?

[paolo bevilacqua]

As Daniel indicated above, you can probably use a COR configuration to prevent external calls from going to the paging DN.