Auto Attendant Forwarding Rules Order

[TONY SMITH]

This has been doing my head in.  If you have more than one forwarding rule in an Auto Attendant, how do you determine or change the order of these rules?  I started off with two rules, "Open" forward sto one destination during office hours, and a second rule "Closed" forwarding to a different destination at all other times. The second rule uses the default "all the time" schedule.

So the order is important, "Open" needs to be first, forwarding to the office hours call handling.  "Closed" then only acts on calls not matching the first rule.

That was all well and good when I first set it up.  However today I edited "Closed" and it changed the order to put "Closed" first.  I thought it might have some stupid principle of putting the most recently edited rule first, even though initially it put the most recently created rule last.  So I tried editing "Open" in the same way, but no it still left "Closed" first.

Tried deleting "Closed" and re-creating but it still inserted it before the "Open"

Tried deleting "Open" and re-creating, but it still put that one last

Eventually I deleted both rules, removed all call forwarding settings, saved everything, logged out and back in, and recreated it.

So what's going on here?

[TONY SMITH]

I think I've found the answer, it puts the rules in alphabetical order. How bonkers is that!

So it was just my bad luck that changing the name reversed the order.  Or my good luck that the original names put the rules in the correct order. So for future reference I will prefix the rules with a serial number to force the correct order.

[dtibbe]

Ouch, haven't expected that as well. Good to know..

Probably a best practise then to name the rules 001-default, 002-holidays, 003-condition a, 004-condition b or so to make the oder visible..

[dtibbe]

hm, just for understanding: You're using a AA but you're always forwarding calls? So why do you use an AA then?

[TONY SMITH]

The function we need is different voicemail greetings for normal office hours, or for when the office is closed. From my earlier question this isn't possible, so we use the Auto Attendant to route the call to one voicemail box or another, depending on the schedule. The two mailboxes have different greeting.

I accept there may be another way of doing this, but if so then I haven't found it.