Helpful tip to anyone using AT&T IPFlex during this COVID-19 Quarantine

I hope you are all doing well during these strange days.

Many of you are suddenly having to support a whole lot of remote workers during this Coronavirus quarantine, and you have likely been asked to forward office telephone numbers to their mobile numbers. Your telephone system can probably do this, but the call will "trombone" through your phone system, so one call-path comes into your office, and then forwards out again through another call-path. Your system may not have the capacity to support all of your workforce like this, and you may have already gotten anecdotal messages about busy signals.

If your company uses AT&T's IPFlex service, you may not know that you can have AT&T forward the call for you BEFORE it ever hits your telephone system. AT&T supports both "forwarding" and "simultaneous ring".

This article is for those of you who have access to the IPFlex "Enhanced Features" portal. I have been told that all IPFlex customers have access to these features (it used to be an add-on, but it should be included now). I believe there is an "end-user" portal for people to individually manage their own features, but I have not used it.

So assuming you have access to the Enhanced Features portal, here is how you would set these forwarding features to alleviate congestion in your telephone systems:

Step 1 - Log into Enhanced Features and select the telephone number you'd like to manage. You will see a list of available features:

Most of these features are self-explanatory. If we select the "Call Forwarding - Always" feature, we can then enable it and add a mobile number.

Note here I am forwarding my office line to my mobile phone. If anyone calls my desk number, AT&T will forward it to my mobile and will NOT consume any resources in my office telephone system. If you have 10,000 workers suddenly working remotely, I'm sure you can imagine the benefit to your poor telephone system.

Note - if you select the "play ring reminder" option, then a short ring burst will come to your phone system to alert the desk phone. It's probably is a negligible impact on your telephony resources, but completely useless if your workers are not in the office.

Perhaps more exiting is the "Simultaneous Ring" feature. This gives you much more control:

This feature allows you to enter several numbers that will ring simultaneously. You can even set a schedule. There is also an option to require "answer confirmation", so that when you answer you will hear "please press any key to complete this call". This is a very handy option that:

1) Allows you to determine whether the call came through your office number or came directly to your mobile

2) Allows you to use your worker's personal mobile phones. If the worker does not answer, or does not press a digit, then the call continues to your corporate voicemail system rather than their personal voicemail.

3) Allows you to ring a group of people. Whoever presses a key first gets the call. This works well for departments that typically share a number. No need to set up "remote agents" for small groups - even if you telephone system has this feature.

And again, all of this routing takes place within the IPFlex network. Your telephone system could be completely congested or even powered off and these features will continue to work.

We are all doing our part during this crisis. To all of you telecom engineers out there, I salute you! I would love to hear your stories about how the telephone system became the hero!