[cisco-voip] an intercom without the talking?

[John P Callahan]

We recently migrated our health center from Nortel Meridian phones to 
7941/7961s on CUCM 7.1(3) and one of the things we found out after we 
were almost done was that the two phones in the reception area had two 
buttons on their Nortel Meridian phones that they described as "buzzers" 
for the two nurses phones on the other side of the facility.

I don't know how it was implemented on the Nortel side, but from what 
was described (they press a button at a reception phone and the nurses 
phone makes a tone) the closest feature I could come up with on short 
notice was Intercom.  We built intercom lines on all four phones and 
instructed the reception to simply dial the intercom for the nurse they 
wanted, then hang up.

The nurses complained that the intercom alert tone is too quiet and too 
quick - so we switched to having the reception staff verbally announce 
"Patient X is here for you" but now they complain that if they are on 
the phone the voice comes through the handset mixed with the existing 
caller rather than through the speaker.

I haven't found any way to increase the volume of or change the alert 
tone, and the way the intercom mixes with a regular call on the handset 
seems to be as documented and presumably as designed.

Has anyone else found a way to address this?  Is there a setting I am 
missing somewhere?

My plan B is to whip up a service that sends a CiscoIPPhoneExecute 
object with a Play URI to the target phones - but that sounds like a lot 
of work, and potentially hard to support over time.

Regards,
John

-- 
John P. Callahan<jcallaha at willamette.edu>
Director, Network Services
Willamette University
900 State St, Salem OR, 97301
Phone: 503-375-5495 Fax: 503-375-5456