What is the best way to configure notification of on-call personnel?

[Brook Powers]

What is the best way to configure notification or call forwarding to on-call personnel?

1. If you have a rotating schedule for technicians who handle after hours support requests, or

2. You have property managers who take turns being on call evenings or weekends, or

3. You have a priest that must transfer calls for pastoral counseling when he is out of town...

It must be simple to make changes so that the customer can make changes without tech support.

The customer should be able to make updates remotely.

Changes must NOT require use of the CCA.

I was thinking about a virtual extension for emergencies but there is no way to change the call forwarding target without a physical phone and soft key.

Your thoughts and suggestions appreciated.

[David Trad]

Hi Brook,

I looooooove this question, I could not get anyone to give me an answer on this so I kept playing with persistence untill I come up with a workable solution ... I FOUND ONE!!!!     \0/ \0/ \0/  Well one that worked for me and the client LOL

OK...

• If there is not enough button real-estate on the phone then purchase a SPA-500s
• Program each rotating personnel to a floating extension
• Program each floating extension to a reserved button
• On each floating extension apply a call-forward-all explicit rule to the designated number
• Teach client how to do call-forwarding to those floating extensions

However in the above proposal there is a caveat for it to work, or work correctly in all my testing. You must have all incoming calls pointing to a single extension so that way all incoming calls and be steered easily, doing it from a blast group did not seem possible at the time I was tinkering around with this, and night-service mode become so convoluted it would have been too hard for the client to manage it.

The plus side to my proposed format up above, is that it can be managed with Office Manager if they need to change numbers

I am not sure if this will help you, but alas at least it is a suggestion for you to look at

Cheers,

David.

[danplacek]

I would consider using a custom AA script.

What I would probably do is create 2 scripts:

1. Scheduler:

- Allows users to call in (maybe prompt for VM pin?) and make changes

- They would select which "on call position" they would like to modify

- the sub menu would give them a predefined list of users ("Joe", "John", "Jim"), followed by the option to put in a custom phone number

2. Call router (one of these for each on call position?)

- incoming calls come to here, get routed based on what was last selected in scheduler script.

Basically this setup would allow someone to call in and specify who is on call -- either from a pre-defined list, or by entering a custom phone number

EDIT: This could also be accomplished in TCL I am sure -- but would likely be a lot more complicated.