LineURI with Same Phone Number and Different Extension

Iron Contributor

I have a department that wants all of their outgoing calls to go from one number. I have a set of test phones which I changed to do this process, but I wanted to make sure I am not going to break anything or cause issues at a later time.

 

What I did was set the Line URI to be in the following format:  tel:+1######3537;ext=3524

 

Where the tel:+1######3537 remains the same for each of the numbers, but ;ext=3524 is whatever number that phone is logged on as. It appears to work as I can still call the 3524 in this case and it rings to the correct phone or vice versa. If I call outside of our campus, caller ID displays as ###-###-3537 which is correct. Again, I want to make sure I am not causing any new issues or issues down the road.

 

I know that the ext=#### is simply to allow us to be able to log on easily to a phone in our case using PIN. Does doing this set up cause any issues or are others doing this to control how caller ID goes out for some areas? If this works, I can see using this similar set up for department chairs or others that do not want to display their real number. For this set up, I did not want to create private numbers which we have done, but if the above process works, then I would like to set this up.

 

We are a hybrid setup. Let me know if you there are any questions. Curious if this is going to cause me any issues now or in the future.

 

Thank you!

 

John

 

8 Replies

It's an outgoing caller ID masking done at either at your SFB/Lync Hybrid server or Voice Gateway level. And you can implement the same configuration to other departments as well without causing any issues. 

Great! That's what I was hoping as it appeared to work. I just wanted some assurances from others. :) This is going to help us out in other areas where they did not want their number shared outside of the university.

 

John

 

One other question or clarification. The number I will be doing this with is a Response Group. I wanted to confirm that will not cause an issue by having the Response Group have number ###-###-1191 and then set six phones so they also have ###-###-1191 as their LineURI.

 

The reason I ask it that I tried to do this with another set of phones a week or so ago thinking this would work. I caused that number to stop working. The difference, the other number I was dealing with was a ACD using Clarity Connect. Again, trying to make sure I will not cause any issues by doing this process on a Response Group and phones in that Response Group.

 

Thank you!

 

John

 

This is acceptable, however there may be better ways.  One big caveat to this approach is that if you ever accidentally assign the number without an ;ext= at the end, it will break calling for everyone all at once. For example, if you set that response group to have just tel:+1XXXYYYZZZZ and another user has the same number with an ;ext= at the end, Skype will send a 485 ambigous SIP response back and the call will fail.  For the response group, you might want to use ;ext=0 or something or create a dial plan for the PSTN gateway to normalize the inbound call to match if needed.  

 

Alternatively, everyone could get their own caller ID and you could just set a call mask on the outbound route to mask everyone's caller ID to the main number on the way out, nice and simple.

To be clear, "it will break calling for everyone all at once" I meant inbound calls to those that use the same number due to Skype not knowing where to deliver the call to.


@Anthony Caragol wrote:

To be clear, "it will break calling for everyone all at once" I meant inbound calls to those that use the same number due to Skype not knowing where to deliver the call to.


Thank you for the added information. I have not done much with normalization of calls at this time. Our vendor who set it up did it for us. I will discuss with them the information you provided.

 

This might might explain why when I tried it a week or so ago it broke a ACD phone line.

 

Thanks again!

 

John

 

Yeah, I'm guessing that's exactly what happened.  I don't like the ext= thing and reusing phone numbers, but that may be me being a risk-adverse consultant.  The reason I don't like it is because even if I understand it, and the person responsible for the solution understands it, the new hire helpdesk kid setting up a user might forget.  That new kid can easily mess up calling for a whole lot of people.

Anthony,

 

I did it again today. I went to our admissions department who has a response group set up which I did for them. They had an issue where student workers were calling customers back from student phones and the customers were calling them back at their numbers. I had the bright idea to change the LineURI to be the main number (which was the Response Group number) and ended up breaking all calls until I got it corrected. Basically, I had to go back and set back their LineURI to their number plus ext=####. So, after we had this discussion, I ended up doing it again and broke the response group until I got it resolved.

 

In our case, it is me that is setting this up for the campus. Hoping to eventually hand it off to someone else to do this set up and programming, but currently it is all me. So, when it stops working or I have issues, I am to blame. :)

 

John