Who is calling me?

[Andrew Byrd]

Scenario: Just deployed new phones at a mid size company. They want all phones to ring when a caller calls so that anyone can answer. However, the bookkeeper wants to know if it is a transferred call to her or if it is part of the ring group. How can she know if someone internally transferred a call to her or if it is just a normal ring group call?

 

[Architect]

You can use the CID Name Prefix option in the Ring Group you have set up.

All calls to the Ring Group will have the prefix displayed on screen with the Caller ID info, but calls direct to the bookkeeper will not.

Example attached...

 

[Andrew Byrd]

Thank you Architect - I did find a way to do this using distinctive ring tones.

I got it to work where when ext to ext is dialed, it uses a different ring tone

Here is the new issue:

Ringtone 1 - set up for outside inbound calls - works great

Ringtone 2 - set up for ext to ext (internal calls) works great

But when outside callers call, it uses Ringtone 1 like it is supposed to do. But when I transfer the call to another extension, it uses Ringtone 1 instead of Ringtone 2, meaning the person who received the transfer won't answer because the ringtone sounds like an outside call

I need Ringtone 2 to be in use on the transferred call

Any ideas on this one?

Your idea was fine, but the client does not want to look at every phone call to determine if it is for her or not.

 

[Adrian Fretwell]

Andrew, there are many ways a transfer can be initiated and processed. Most of my customers use Yealink phones and they use the buttons on the phones to initiate the transfer. When the transfer button is used it causes the phone to send an in-dialog REFER message to initiate the transfer.

Generally in these cases the resulting INVITE that will go out to the transferee, will contain a Referred-By SIP header. It is possible to test for this header in the dialplan. In my experiment I test for the header containing an @ sign. If it does that we can set a SIP Alert-Info header to specify the ring tone.

An example dialplan entry is shown in the screen shot below. There may be a much better way of doing this, but it works for me.

 

[Andrew Byrd]

Thank you Adrian. I will test your suggestion.