Forums
Simple:
Just a flag to enable a ring group in hunt lists.
Advanced:
Enable ringgroups basen on variables. An INTERNET_DOWN variable could be usefull to activate ringgroups which would direct calls to cell phones. Some customers could use a PRETEND_TO_BE_IN_THE_OFFICE variable..
More Advanced:
Schedule the setting af variables. eg the LUNCH variable.
Just some thoughts.
Submitted by eeman on Thu, 06/03/2010
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you can already do this if you know how to write code.. theres a custom command option in the huntlists that you can use to issue ExecIF statements should you wish. This allows someone perform some of these half-baked ideas without messing up the system for those that have no intention of using those features. Remember, every time you add some line of code with some conditional attached you impose another chance for disaster; Another chance for something not to match correctly. Bugs in this industry aren't like bugs in other software venues. Bugs in this world result in failure of phone calls. People have almost no patience for those kinds of bugs.
In MTE its even more complicated because those variables you describe are part of the global variable subset. You dont want tenants writing or changing your global variables and its never good having thousands of global variables so that one tenant setting PRETEND_TO_BE_IN_THE_OFFICE=1 doesnt cause every damn tenants calls to re-route somewhere else =)
If you maintain a strict discipline to the philosophy of K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid) you might lack a few bells and whistles, but people will know you for being highly reliable. There are SOOO many providers out there that are so unreliable that given the choice of some half-baked feature someone might use for a week only to forget about it later vs. a service that is always available, people will choose the one with more reliability and dependability. An example of this is Google voice. Remember, the application that 'was going to put us all out of business'. What a novelty. Hardly anyone really uses it and its only redeeming feature was the dictation of speech-to-text voicemail which had maybe an 80% accuracy.
Using the Custom Command line allows providers to set up some half-baked idea for a single customer without placing dialplan logic in place for everyone else.
One next-step idea I had for improving huntlists more is to allow an optional label for the priority
exten => s,n(label),command
so your custom lines can use Goto and GotoIF without having to count the number of lines in the huntlists.include file.