QUESTION Dial by name or Direct Dial extension to VM only?

[Donb123]

I don't want phones ringing into teacher classrooms. On an old Trixbox system I was able to modify the IVR to ignore extensions of teachers for inbound calls and made separate extensions for VM versus phone. I'm thinking there's probably an easier way now in Freepbx/PBXIAF to accomplish this and in this implementation I'm not even using IVR. So I need to figure out how to prevent people from calling to a teacher extension in VM if the receptionist doesn't answer and just get their VM instead.
Thanks!

 

[rossiv]

Wait what? I'm not following your logic here.
I don't understand the call flow. Are you asking how to prevent someone from dialing another extension in the directory from VM?

 

[Donb123]

This is for a school. I don't want people in the dial-by-name or direct-dial to be able to ring a classroom. It should always give them voicemail for teacher extensions. I figured there had to be an easier way to do this than the kludge I've done in the past. What I did in the past was made all of these digits, upon being dialed, loop back to the top of IVR again.

 

[rossiv]

Make a new Directory with the classrooms as "Custom", use VM Greeting for Name Announcement, and *XXX for the extension where XXX is your extension number and * is your direct to VM prefix.

 

[Donb123]

Okay. That's pretty much the same thing as I did before except that I didn't even make a custom directory- I let Freepbx do it. I had a 4 digit extension and 3 digit voice mail. The 3 digit voice mail has the name associated with it and the 4 digit extension has the room number as the user name field. As I mentioned, I had done this in the past with an IVR and if someone direct-dialed the extension it would simply put them back at the top of the IVR tree.

So I guess there's not an easier way to do it now.

I just figured that since the software knows a call is coming in from a trunk and going to a given extension there would be a way to not allow it if it was straight from the trunk unless an operator touched it first- otherwise send straight to VM instead of ringing the phone.

Thanks.

 

[Donb123]

So I found what you were getting at. I just make a new directory and change the extension number to *extension. That's easy enough. How do I make the system use this new directory?

Thanks so much!

 

[rossiv]

So I found what you were getting at. I just make a new directory and change the extension number to *extension. That's easy enough. How do I make the system use this new directory?

Thanks so much!

If you're using an IVR, there should be a new option in the dropdown for the digit's destination that shows Directory, and another box should appear listing your newly-created directory.