9/29/2015 Distinctive Ring

9/29/2015 Distinctive Ring

I am pleased to announce that we have added support for distinctive rings in Protel LTS.

This feature is available on the update that was pushed today.  If your PBX does not automatically update when you log into it, run the manual update command from the Maintenance menu.  This new functionality can be used to trigger different ring tones in IP phones that support SIP-Alert-Info headers.  This is currently only deployed to enable sending distinctive ring alerts for calls that are coming from an ACD queue, though we do expect to add this capability to individual DIDs and extensions in the very near future.  This is a helpful feature to have if your deployment has extension users that log into one or more queues simultaneously, as you can now have their phone play a different ring sound depending on where the call is coming from.

To deploy this on the PBX side, navigate to Queues/Modify Existing Queue and select the Queue that you want to apply a distinctive ring to.  Under the Advanced tab, you will see an added field for defining a Distinctive Ring Identifier.  This can be any text string that you want, numbers/letters only - no spaces or special characters.  Be sure to run the reload command after you have saved your changes.

On the phone side, you will need to locate the web UI page that controls distinctive rings.  This may be in a general phone settings/audio section, or it may be under the accounts settings under either an "audio" or "advanced" tab.   If your phone supports this feature, and most SIP2 phones do, you simply enter the Distinctive Ring Identifier string in the value field and select which of the phone's ring tones you want it to trigger.

If you need assistance, please let us know.


Part 2 released 10/1/2015


The ability to add SIP Alert strings to Queued calls that was released earlier in the week has now been expanded to include DIDs, Groups and SLAs.
The update released this afternoon gives you this functionality.   For DIDs, this is located under the new Advanced Settings link under the DID Management tab.  For Groups, select the group to apply the header to, select the Advanced tab and enter the text in the field at the top of the page.  For SLAs, select Create/Modify Shared Extension under the Groups tab, then select the Advanced tab to enter your distinctive ring text string.
If multiple alert strings are applied through your call flow, the system will only recognize the last one.  Therefore, if you apply a distinctive ring to a DID and that call ends up in a group or a queue that also has a distinctive ring, the call will trigger the group or queue ring, not the originating DID ring.


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