This phone can handle 9 lines but has only 3 actual line buttons. (Marked L1, L2, and L3). What is the best way to program the L2 and L3 buttons? Do I have to assign them a different extension number? I have L1 programmed as extension 20. (Ext. 20 - 29) are used around the office. Do I have to program the other lines as extensions 30 - 39 and 40 - 49 ? Why should each phone have to have so many extension numbers? This phone actually handles 9 lines, so am I to understand it could use 9 extension numbers if I programmed all of them? Wow, what a waste of numbers and confusion!
I must be missing something.
Well I dont know about your specific phone model, but with the Cisco 7960’s we have here, they have 6 buttons/lines. Each “line” needs to be a different extension. As to “why” - well, we generally don’t use em all, or most of them. Most people in our office have only one extension - some have more than one to give them ease of use in telling who the call is for. For ex: call on Ext 1X = Sales, 2X = Support, etc (for a person who does multiple jobs).
Oh, and secretaries, they generally have multiple lines so they can handle incoming calls and pass them about (the ones that bypass the IVR)
you can do it one of two ways.
Way #1 is to program one account into ‘global SIP’. Now all 3 buttons are with that account/extension. The 3 buttons become 3 call appearances- the first call is line1, second concurrant call is line2, etc
otherwise you can program a different SIP account into each button, this means you can individually address each button and each button does something different.
You can also mix and match, set ‘global sip’ and it will apply to all buttons except if you define any of the 3 it will override global sip
hope that helps
My question was mainly how to layout an extension numbering scheme if you wanted to use the buttons as “lines” and not just “call appearances”. If I have to assign each button a different extension number so my dialplan can send incoming calls from different lines to each button, than that uses up a lot of extension numbers. For my little business it is not a big deal, but for large companies, wow.
My thoughts:
Line 1 use extension 200 - 299
Line 2 use extension 300 - 399
etc etc.
So one phone would tie up extension number 20, 30, 40, etc.
Exten 20 would be the only one published in any directories and such but the dialplan would use the other ones to connect a call to.
ahh, remember that channel != extension, so the exten 41 and SIP/41 are very different.
what i would do is in sip.conf make them XX1 XX2 XX3 etc
so for extension 53, you would have 531, 532, 533 etc
then in the dialplan only have two digit extension that wouldnt include the suffix, so for example-
exten => _XX,1,Dial(SIP/${EXTEN}1) would dial only line 1’s then for external calls let them do
exten => _XX,1,Dial(SIP/${EXTEN}2) and all extension dialed calls from the outside go to line 2
etc etc, even tho its the same extension and doesn’t impact your extension namespace