Recently we had a request from one of our employees to add some feature capability to his mobile phone. This would allow him to turn EC500 (mobile twinning) on and off remotely with his mobile phone. It would also allow him to send all calls to his desk phone remotely and access pbx dial tone remotely. With this last ability, he can establish calls remotely from his cell phone, but the caller ID that shows to the called party is his company DID number. This is a great feature if you don’t want the world to know your mobile phone number. He can also now dial a four digit extension for any of our employees from his mobile phone.

FNE’s are the extensions in your dial plan that your EC500 can dial from an outside EC500 phone to activate Communication Manger features.

Usually each of these entries is populated with a DID. However to conserve DID’s, we decided to use a VDN and came up with the following solution:

1. Populate the required FNE’s using non-DID numbers:
change off-pbx-telephone feature-name extensions

Feature non-DID extension
Active Appearance Select 3405
Idle Appearance Select 3406
Off-PBX Call Enable 3401
Off-PBX Call Disable 3402
Send All Calls 3403
Send All Calls Cancel 3404

2. Select an available DID to create a VDN.
add vdn 2075 to use vector 75

3. Add and record an announcement with the features you’ve selected.
add announcement 1550

Script: To enable your EC500 press 1. To disable EC500 press 2. To enable Send All Calls press 3. To disable Send All Calls press 4. To extend call press 5. To make a call press 6.

4. Write the vector steps based on the selections you have given your caller in the announcement.
change vector 75
wait-time 2 secs hearing silence
collect 1 digits after announcement 1550 for none
route-to number 3401 with cov y if digit = 1
route-to number 3402 with cov y if digit = 2
route-to number 3403 with cov y if digit = 3
route-to number 3404 with cov y if digit = 4
route-to number 3405 with cov y if digit = 5
route-to number 3406 with cov y if digit = 6
stop

Besides conserving DID’s another advantage to this method is having to remember only one number for numerous FNE’s instead of individual DID’s.

Remember that you will need a PRI for this function.