We are doing a UC560 deployment when an organization would like to have calls routed by the auto attendant to sales, support and the operator. We are also attempting to follow the Cisco requirement that only CCA or CUE be used for configuration (no CLI).
This is a small organization (less than 20) and the responsible party for answering those calls changes during the workday.
A Blast Group is not appropriate because that would ring every phone that belongs to the group on every call.
The BACD does not support login and logoff of members, so it presents the same issue as a Blast Group in that parties not currently responsible for the group calls end up having their phone ring on every incoming call to the group.
We can create a single shared line for each group, but this limits the number of calls that can be handled before going to voice mail to one because dual line buttons reserve one line for calling out. Octo line buttons can only be placed on the first button and this also has to be the user's primary extension, so unless a Blast Groups or BACD delivers a call to the primary extension, you can't take advantage of the octo-line capability.
We can create multiple shared lines for each group and then cascade CFB to succesive shared lines in a group and CFNA to a voice mail only extension. The last shared line wouild also CFB to the same voice mail only extension. The drawback here is that to handle up to four calls per group would require 12 buttons on an individual's phone that has responsibility for each group at one time or another.
The overlay button seems to address most of the issues above. If we make one of the overlaid call appearances the voice mail only extension, the button icon can also act as a message waiting indicator.
However, CCA appears to only allow existing shared lines to be included in an overlay, That means the individual 12 shared line buttons must exist on some phone (or spread across phones) before they can be added to an overlay. Removing the individual line buttons after the overlay is created invalidates the overlay when trying to save the CCA Configure->Telephony->Voice dialog box changes.
In summary, two questions:
1. Is there a way to create shared line appearances that can be included in an overlay without first assigning them to individual buttoms?
2. Is there a better way to handle incoming calls to "group" extensions where there is a need to handle multiple calls to the group at the same time?
P.S. We are aware that we could assign a separate normal line button to each member of a group and use a blast group to ring all members at the same time. This gets around the proliferation of shared lines, but all of these blast group members will ring on incoming calls. We could use a solution posted on this site for silent rings using a silent.raw ring tone, but that configuration is overwritten when a UC500 is updated with a new software pack. This also requires CLI to get the ringtone and XML control files to the UC500 and the appropriate alias registered.
