proper way to forward DID and AA calls

[jeremy]

What is the proper way to forward a DID call to another extension and have it go to the forwarded extensions voice mail box?

A better explanation -

Say you have a user that goes on medical leave, long vacation, leaves the company, etc and you/they want to forward all their calls to someone else. What is currently happening with our system is that if a user changes their call handling mode to always forward to another extension, it forwards to the extension and voice mail to the forwarded extension only if the call is placed internally on our system. If the call comes from an outside line such as DID or the AA, it rings the phone of the extension it's forwarded to but then goes back to the original extension/users voice mail if nobody picks up.

The only two really worky work arounds I've found is to set the call handling mode to extended absence then forward to an external number and use the DID of the other phone on our system. Obviously this is a bit silly because it takes up another line on the PRI. The other work around I've found is to create a DNIS record pointing the DID digits received to another extension. Users can't do this themselves and I know there is a better way.

I've tried every setting in the call manager I can think of but am always forwarded back to the original users voice mail.

Am I missing something completely obvious?

Thanks in advance for any help

[Jason Learmouth]

I guess the reasoning is that if you call user Y then you would expect to get user Y's VM if they didn't answer. If you want user X's VM to take the call then you could try this as a work around:

Create an AA that has a time out value of 0 and time out action of "Take a message for user X"

Forward user Y to the AA. You might need to record a prompt that is a 0.1sec WAV file of silence to get rid of the default prompt.

A bit clunky to manage but I'm 99% sure it will achieve what you want.

[phoneguy]

Here is how I got it to work. If you change the call handeling mode for say, extended absence to forward to another extension and they don't answer, record the greeting for that call handeling mode to say something on the lines that the person will not be back for awhile and press zero to leave a message with Joe Schmoe. Set the personal assistant in the extended absence mode to Joe Schmoe and viola.

[Kennytlaloc]

Could you not forward the phone to the person who is covering for the absent person and then forward copies of the voice mail to them as well?
For example user A is absent and user B is their backup. Forward all calls to user B and let the calls go to user A's mailbox. Then in their voice mail settings forward all copies of their voice mail back to user B. This way, user B does not have to check 2 voice mails and can handle user A's messages.

Just a thought.

Ken

[VJ]

Put them in a group and forward the group on B/NA to a route point with a MB. Give it a distribution list of all concerned. Not eating up licenses.

[jeremy]

Ok, so it seems I wasn't missing anything and thank you for all of your responses.

I guess to me, the least clunky way to do this is to forward to the DID. It just seems like when you forward your calls, they should to go the forwarded destination and not bounce back to the voice mail where they came from, or at least have that option. There really should be an easy way for a user to do this because I've run into it on more than 5 occasions now.

If I forward my home phone to my cell phone, it goes to my cell phone and cell phone voice mail if I don't answer. The ShoreTel system should be able to do the same thing.

[jstevens78239]

I completely agree, and there is this sort of option on other phone systems. On a Mitel, they are called system speed call extensions. I have asked for an enhancement to include the ability to set up transfer & release extensions. I used to use route points in an earlier version, and the call would not come back to the Shoretel system if there was no answer. Since ver 6, they've changed the route points and I can't use them for this purpose any more.

Doesn't anyone ever need to send an option on an auto attendant, or on a user's extension, off to an external number and then just let the call go? We have business partners who we outsource some of our functions to and we'd like to just have an option send the caller to an external number. But there is no function in Shoretel that will transfer the call offsite and not try and take a message here if nobody answers within a certain number of rings on the other end.