MWI with time of day routing 1

[astros30]

I work for a school district and have to use time of day routing in order for teachers not to receive calls during the day. I have set up a CTI route point that is in the active partition during the day to route all teacher calls to voice mail.

This works great, but I also need the teachers to be able to get MWI on there phones while there phones are not in the active partition. If anyone has any workarounds for this please let me know. Thanks

 

[whykap]

Can your voice mail css see the inactive partition?

 

[astros30]

yes my voice mail partition has access to the inactive partition.

Is this working as designed if the partition that phones reside in is inactive that I can't get MWI?

 

[RushikeshDeshpande]

Typically what you should do is have 2 partitions for the teachers, one with time schedule for schoolHours, and another one with time schedule of AfterHours (or nonschool hours). Tie these partitions with 2 similar translation patterns (Lets say your extensions for teachers are 2000-2999, the the translation pattern should be 2XXX). one tranlation pattern has called party transform mask set to voicemail #, and is tied to the partition with time schedule SchoolHours, and the second translation pattern (also 2XXX) has called party transform mask field blank, and time schedule AfterHours attached to it. Now, the gateway CSS only has access to these 2 partitions.....and only one of the two is active at any time...so depending on the time when the users call, they will hit either the voice mail...or get the actual phone. But there is also a 3rd partition to which all the internal externals belong...to which voice mail also has access...but the gateway does not. so when a voice mail is left...it should be able to dial out and turn on the MWI. Let me know if this works for you? I might have confused you a bit...so if you need more clarifications, let me know.

 

[VoIPGuyNSC]

This solution will present a problem if the call isn't coming directly from a gateway, however. In our schools, for example, all incoming calls go to a main number which is routed to a Call Handler in Unity, where the caller is then prompted to enter the extension you are trying to reach. In this scenario, the call would originate from Unity and then you run into the same problem as before where Unity has to have access to the phone partition in order for MWI to work.

John Lever
Telecommunications
Richland School District Two

 

[VoIPGuyNSC]

You know, the more I thought about it, this isn't a problem afterall. You simply specify a few Voice Mail ports with a different CSS and set those ports as the only MWI dialout. Works like a champ. Wish I had thought of this sooner. Thanks astros for getting the 'ole wheel spinning.

John Lever
Telecommunications
Richland School District Two

 

[astros30]

Thank you for all of the insight. I still have not been able to get it working this way. What I don't understand is that I have a phone with it's DN in a inactive partition. I can make calls out using this phone in the inactive partition. I dial the MWI on from the phone it's self but no light. I don't get fast busy or anything like that. I just don't get MWI.

 

[VoIPGuyNSC]

The trick is not to have the actual phones themselves in the schedule based partition, but in a partition which is accessible by the CSS assigned to your Unity MWI ports.

We have an Admin_PT partition for directory numbers which should always ring and a TeacherPhone_PT partition for DNs which should forward to VM based on the Time Schedule. What determines if the call goes to the phone or to voicemail are two completely different partitions, call it SchoolHours_PT and AfterHours_PT. Its these Partitions that you set a schedule on. And then in the SchoolHours_PT, create your CTI route point with CFA to VM and your matching DN pattern, XXXX for example. Then, in your AfterHours_PT, create a translation pattern with the same matching pattern, and don't do anything else except change the CSS to one that can reach your TeacherPhone_PT.

Next, create a TimeBased_CSS which has your normal, call all of the time partition, in this case Admin_PT, your SchoolHours_PT, AfterHours_PT and any other partitions which you may use. It is *THIS* CSS that you assign to not only your gateway, but also to the majority of your VM ports. I say majority, because you'll notice that the TeacherPhone_PT is not in there.

Next, set aside a few VM ports for MWI notification. You'll need to go into Unity and uncheck MWI notification for the majority of the ports you configured the TimeBased_CSS on earlier. For those remaining few VM ports, you will use a CSS which contains the same partitions as TimeBased_CSS, except replace SchoolHours_PT and AfterHours_PT with your TeacherPhone_PT.

Finally, check the CSS assigned to your MWI setup in CM. Make sure that it can reach all of your phone partitions.

It sounds complicated to setup, but in reality, all you are really doing is intercepting calls normally destined for a teacher partition and rerouting them to Unity. The trick in our case, since outside calls 'originate' from Unity, was to separate the CSS assigned to the VM ports. It wasn't until this thread started that it even occured to me to do this.

John Lever
Telecommunications
Richland School District Two

 

[astros30]

Thanks John I really appreciate the time and effort you put into your reply. This is finally clear to me how this should work. I have some redesigning to do on my callmanager. Again I appreciate the awesome reply.