Moving from a Partner

[thejkro]

A little background. I have an S8500 with 9 gateways and an ESS.

We just acquired an office that has a Partner and we want to replace it with a G350. Normally our setup is to give everyone call appearances and setup call parking and park pickup buttons for everyone. The inbound calls normally go into a vector to be routed off if possible and the rest of the calls go to a terminating extension group. This office wants to be different. They basically want the phones to act like they do now. They want to see their "lines" and be able to pick them up from any of the 30 or so phones they have.

And now the question. My thought was to have all the calls just ring the a front desk extension and then put bridged call appearance on all the phones and then put maybe one normal call appearance on all the phones to keep the ability to page and other things. Is there any better way then bridged calling to do this?

 

[Lostpbx]

If you are going to have the calls ring to one extension up front can't you put busy indicators on that phone and just transfer the calls as needed? Or put them all in a pick-up group so they can pull the calls as they want to answer?

 

[thejkro]

that's the thing, they want to be able to see all the calls on all the phones. a pickup group might work but they aren't all in a small area so it would be hard to hear a ring to know to pickup

 

[ZeroZeroOne]

What you probably want is a Personal Central Office Line (PCOL) for each individual line that can be assigned to each phone.

Personally, I'd tell the users to learn the new system ;-)

 

[Lostpbx]

You can always give them a phone like the 6424d+ and add all the extensions on it as abusy-indicator so they could see all the calls and see who was on the phone and still put them in a pick-up group. Or still have them ring to one phone up front and then they can transfer to who they need to and with a big phone at every desk you can still see who is on the line.

 

[lopes1211]

They are asking to replicate "what they know" rather than what may be best for their office. You need to get a good understand of what they are trying to accomplish rather than just duplicate the Partner "just because".

There are very few valid scenarios for a HUGE key system setup but as other's have mentioned, a pickup group plus call-appr 1 bridged onto several external ringers placed around the office would be one solution.

-CL

 

[thejkro]

Yeah. I'm not a big fan of this. I would MUCH rather do our usual call parking and stuff. But senior management said if that's how they want it, make them happy. I'm going to look into the pickup group. The personal CO-line is a good idea too. I'm going to try and go back to management and tell them this really isn't a good way to operate and see if they let me do what I want. Thanks for the ideas!

 

[avayastrongman79]

thejkro...

Do you know what kind of service they currently have from their carrier? Do they have a bunch of separate Centrex lines coming into the partner switch? Or do they just have fb lines of some type?

The only reason I ask, is we converted a similar site of ours from a Partner to an s8300 w/g350. We took all of their individual centrex numbers (20 total) and converted to a small block of DID, and installed a PRI.

From there, we set up their main published numbers as hunt groups that cover to separate pickup groups. I also created a couple small intercom groups, so they could communicate internally to a group of phones. Just a thought, sorry to ramble on so much.

 

[thejkro]

Now that's a solution. Unfortunately, we only have 11 Centrex lines so converting to a PRI would definitely not be cost effective. I think I could still make that work. It'd be a lot of work but I'll try it out.

 

[avayastrongman79]

I figured I'd throw it out there, worth a shot. Best of luck to you, I'm sure you'll find a good fix.

 

[Lostpbx]

I new someone would have another idea, I might steal it too.