At ArtisIT, we take pride in doing whatever it takes to find the right solution to an IT problem. We also do something that is…well…not very common in today’s world. We listen to the customer’s complaints and do our best to address those complaints. Part of the “right” solution is to fully understand the problem. We had a situation recently where a client was having some issues/questions regarding their Cisco CallManager Express (CME) and Cisco Unity Express (CUE) system. We listened to the customer’s issues and prioritized them in the order of importance. We weren’t looking to overhaul their entire system. We were looking to make their system work better and more efficiently. We were looking to provide knowledge to the customer regarding the capabilities of their existing system. Basically we were looking for ways to empower our clients with the knowledge they need to make the best use of what they have.

For the Cisco CME, another name for an IP phone is an Ethernet phone, or ephone…not to be confused with ephone-dn, which is an Ethernet phone directory number. An ephone-dn consists of the following:

• Virtual voice port
• Dial peer

The Virtual voice port is analogous to a physical phone line. The dial peer is what determines the phone number associated with the virtual voice port.

The ephone-dn is typically configured with a “call-forward busy” and a “call-forward noan”. The call will be forwarded to the destination if the line is busy or if there is no answer, typically after 4 rings.

One scenario that we run into is as follows: Let’s say you are at your desk and the receptionist informs you that a call came in for you. You tell the receptionist that you are unable to take the call. One option that the receptionist has is to go ahead and forward the call to your phone number and the person on the other end waits for 3 or 4 rings and then the call gets routed to voice mail. It would be more efficient….and professional…for the receptionist to say “Mr. …. is not able to take your call at this time. Can I put you through to his voice mail?”

One way to accomplish this is to create a secondary set of extensions, with, say, another number (in this case 7) appended to the original extension. If a person’s extension is 2150 as defined in an ephone-dn, another extension of 72150 will be created for that person. A typical ephone-dn might look like this:

ephone-dn 15 dual-line
numer 2150
name My Name
call-forward busy 1900
call-forward noan 1900 timeout 20

The following ephone-dn could be created to send all calls transferred to anyone with a 2xxx extension number directly to voice mail:

ephone-dn 25
numer 72…
call-forward all 1900

The final step is to map the ephone-dn as a button on any IP phone set.

At this point, anyone who forwards an incoming call using the 5-digit extensions of 72xxx will automatically send the calls to the users’ voicemail.