Monitoring an Extension

[seannicholas71]

here is the scenario:
Customer has 22 sales persons that need simultanious ring, so we setup a virual analog extension and have those phones monitoring that extension on button three. They were logged into call manager as themselves individually and when a call came into that analog extension, Call Manager used to show an incoming call coming in on all these peoples and it would pop up the "Answer" option, gave the incoming caller ID, etc. Worked fine.. That was in ShoreTel 7.5.

We upgrade them to the GA of 8.1 on Monday. Monitored Extensions no longer shows incoming calls in Call Manager. It went away. Does anybody know a fix or idea of how to work around this?

[Palitto Consulting]

I am having a hard time testing this as we only have 33 extensions here in our whole system and not all of those are normal users, but:

I do not think 16 is a hard limit on the number of extensions that can be simultaneously rung. I am able to bypass this limit for workgroups and likely for hunt groups as well.

[seannicholas71]

I tested it and it does give you a hard limit for simultanious ringing. I was hoping maybe they increased that in 8.1, but I guess not.

[Palitto Consulting]

I am able to go into the code behind Director, locate the 16, and change it to something else. I am then allowed to add more users to the workgroup. The only thing I do not know is whether their phones will actually ring. This is what I mean by a hard limit--a limit on how the phones are rung, not a limit on how many users are added to the workgroup.

Have you tested this?

[seannicholas71]

Okay, I would love to test this. How do you modify the code? using SQLyog? where is it located? I appreciate your help.

[ShoreTel_Dave]

I have seen hunt groups go a bit wobbly when you over cook them to more than 16 members.
This is a bit from the admin manual...

Each hunt group is composed of an ordered list of no more than 16 users. A maximum of 8 hunt groups totalling no more than 16 members can be assigned to a single switch. If your requirements more complex, you should use workgroups.

I am having a hard time testing this as we only have 33 extensions here in our whole system and not all of those are normal users, but:

I do not think 16 is a hard limit on the number of extensions that can be simultaneously rung. I am able to bypass this limit for workgroups and likely for hunt groups as well.

[Palitto Consulting]

Yes, that would make sense, since it is managed by the switch. They probably have exactly 16 extensions stored, so if you add more, it may just plain not work, or perhaps even corrupt the memory past the end.

I do know this worked with Workgroups on at least one version of ShoreTel. As I noted, I have not yet been able to replicate it on 8.1 due to our lack of phones.

[seannicholas71]

I just don't trust ringing more than 16 phones simultaneously, even if I can trick the ShoreTel and get around the limit with hunt groups or workgroups, so I decided against it. Who knows what other issues could crop up, so they will just have to work the way they are and deal with it. I just wish you could choose to answer and see incoming calls on a monitored extension via PCM, but I put in an enhancement request. time will tell. Thanks for all your help.