Running Emergency Tones through phones

[jkerr]

We have a "PA" system that plays our emergency tones throughout the builiding. I'm wondering if there's anyway to input this into the Shoretel system so that it breaks in over the phones, much like you can do with verbal announcements.

[Palitto Consulting]

Certainly, if you get the right equipment. What is generating the tones?

[jkerr]

It's just an analog tone generator.

[Palitto Consulting]

I would imagine this device behaves like an analog phone? I would recommend you use ShoreTel 8 or later and set it up as an analog user. If the device supports dialing digits, have it dial the extension of a paging group. If it does not, use delayed ringdown with a delay of 0 to automatically connect it to the extension.

With delayed ringdown, you cannot enter the extension of a paging group. You may be able to manually hack this into the ShoreTel database, or you may need to direct the calls to a route point and have a tiny application which transfers it to the paging group. Perhaps someone else could suggest any other ways to make this happen.

[jkerr]

It does not behave like a phone, in the fact that it has no way of dialing an extension. We just flip a switch and the signal from the tone generator cuts in with highest priority on the PA system.

[Palitto Consulting]

In that case you will have to use delayed ringdown as noted above. As soon as the connection is made, the line will be connected to the extension you enter. Since this extension can't be set to a paging group, you may have to hack this extension into the database or have a custom written to forward it from a route point to the paging extension.