We installed an IPxOffice for about a dozen digital extensions and 85 analog extensions (use IPx500 expansion cabinet which works with the Office). We own a residential facility, so the analog extensions are for our residents to use with whatever phone they want. Our phones lines comes from a PRI, and I am the end user who works very very close with my installer (yup, I'm one of "those" clients, but at the end of the day I've given my tech $150k in business in a couple of years, and I really like him, so he doesn't mind it).
OK, so, our residents are elderly so I want their phone lines to emulate what they'd get from Verizon or Qwest, almost PERFECTLY. I don't want them dialing "9" to get an outside line, and I don't want them to ever hit their flash button to check voicemail or weird things. They don't ever need to dial any internal extensions EXCEPT to check their voicemail. And, I'd like the voicemail indicator to be a stutter dialtone when they pickup (like my Verizon line at home).
It all sounds doable, but we're having a heck of a time with it. Since I don't want them to dial 9 to get a line, we set the analog extensions to auto-grab a line. Problem there is once you've auto-grabbed a line you can no longer hear any stutter dialtone if you have a voicemail, since the stutter only happens with the system dialtone. Second problem is that you can no longer dial the extension of the voicemail.
I tried to overcome this by scrapping the stutter dialtone and just giving our resident message waiting indicators; but unfortunately there are NONE that will work well that I've found for less than $15/per. If we found a way to work out a decent MWI, then I thought we could get over the second issue (can't internally call voicemail) by having them dial a DID (we have plenty) that went directly to the voicemail; problem there is that the CID digits of the extension don't pass through in the same way when the call is technically external, so the residents would have to call it, then enter in their extension number, and THEN the password.... NO GOOD, these are elderly residents and that just wouldn't work. My tech is working to find an override for the auto-grab line feature or something, so if they dial "*1234" or something it would NOT make an outside call and would instead make an internal call to voicemail which would of course pass the digits through correctly. No luck there yet, however, and even if he did work it out I'm still stuck without a message indicator.
My last idea that I don't know if its possible is to disable the auto-grab feature and instead let them hear the system dialtone, thereby allowing the stutter dialtone to work brilliantly if they have a voicemail. Next step would be to ADD the digit "9" in front of any string of numbers dialed except for the extension of the voicemail (which digits would be a string that would never be dialed during an attempt to make an outside call). Any ideas if this is possible? Or, any ideas what else might work? I'm going over this with my tech tomorrow, but regardless would like to get some ideas from you all about what else should work.
Tadiran techs have helped a lot for some other issues we ran up against, but they just can't find a workaround for this, except to have the auto-grab line feature delay for 2 seconds, allowing the resident to hear a stutter dialtone if one existed. Problem there is for the rare resident who dials fast BEFORE the auto-dial, or the slow resident who doesn't get the phone to his/her ear before the stutter stops. We bought this system for lots of reasons, and one was hearing the Tadiran rep say from his own mouth that stutter dialtone was possible, and auto-grab a line was possible, but unfortunately the dude didn't tell me that they WEREN'T possible when used together.
Please Help!
