Recently installed a CICS 7.1 with a single CI trunk card. Everything went smoothly and calls were working fine (incoming and outgoing) and then all of a sudden incoming calls were not ringing on the phones. When a call would come in, the line indicator on the phones would light up, but it would not ring. If I pressed the line button, it would say "Line in Use." Outgoing calls worked fine. I dialed in w/ my cell, and after the first ring, something would pick up the line and I could hear what seemed like a secondary dial tone. I wasn't sure what was going on, as it only appeared on lines that were set to Appear & Ring. Lines that were set to Appear Only, I could call that line and pick it up w/o a problem. I started digging into programming, and the only difference that I noted, was that under Trunk/Line Data of Lines programming, there was a section that said "Answer Mode" and it was set to Auto. This only appeared for the lines that were set for Appear & Ring. The Appear Only line did not have this setting. This was the only difference (other than line appearance setting) that I could distinguish between the lines. So the lines that were not working correctly, I set their Answer Mode to Manual, and then all of a sudden everything was working correctly.
I looked up in my Nortel documentation, but I cannot find a clear description of what Answer Mode is or why it would be used. Can anyone tell me what this feature is and what it would be used for?
