atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Toshiba Telephones & Systems DK424 - Fake Extensions?

I'm sure I'm getting the Toshiba terminology all wrong, so I apologize in advance.

I need to have about 50 or so extensions go straight to voicemail, without having an actual physical phone. I'd like them to not use a physical port, either. Right now, I've been taking physical ports and simply forwarding all calls from that port to the voicemail box, which works, but requires a physical port to do this.

Basically, I want a station user to be able to pick up their phone, dial a 3 digit extension for one of these "fake extensions" and end up in the voicemail system for that fake extension.

If it matters, the system interfaces to the VM box via a basic analog card (8 ports). The VM is listening for the Strategy VM tones (it is not a Strategy VM) to determine which box was called. I have around 150 physical ports in the system.

Is there a way to do this that doesn't require a physical port on the system?

How about having the user dial the vmail pilot number and then dial a 3 digit extension. Create a mailbox for this entension and put the mailbox in DND. There is no need for a physical extension if done this way.

That's exactly how I'm handling it now - but the downside of using the pilot number + extension approach is that the users need to know which extensions are transferred that way and which extensions are transferred the "traditional" way. I suppose I could always buy a few more cards off of E-Bay, set them up to forward the calls, and be done with it - but I was hoping for something a bit more elegant.

Phantom Ns would occupy a button on a phone, but not a port. To set these up you would have to have some programming knowledge.

I've never set up a phantom on a Toshiba before, but I've done plenty of other tasks on it, so I think I will be able to figure it out.

It looks like this will work - I see there's a limit on number of phantom's per phone (8), but I have probably 10 ports that currently forward to VM that I could use (all are digital phone ports).

To set them up, it looks like I would use program *04 (link the PhDN port to a logical extension), 33 (set the PhDN Owner phone), and 39 (set up the buttons).

I'm assuming that to set up call forwarding on these, I'd hit the phantom's button on the phantom owner phone, then dial the code to forward all calls and the voicemail hunt number.

You got it...

I'd put these PhDNs on buttons 11-20 on a 10 button set and you won't have to worry about CFAll being accidentally canceled. Just temporarily plug a 20 button phone in to set the CFAll and VMID and then just plug the 10 button set back in.

You will also need prog 04 since you cannot have the same DN in prog 04 and *04. And yes, there is a maximum of 8 PhDN that you can assign per port.