Services

The Services functions allow the user to forward or open/busy-off some or all lines. Line capacities may also be set. When a busy or forward status is set on one or more groups of lines then Services icon on the info pane control bar changes to reflect the status.

Setting a service to Busy

If a service is set to Busy then all of the lines that form that service will appear to external callers as though they are engaged. Busy mode stops any calls arriving in the PhoneBOX system. To set a service to Busy:
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The above example shows that the Test services have been closed, and all related Phone In lines have ‘X’ marked against them. It is possible to limit this control so that some lines can never be closed by a client.

For some services though this is very useful so that callers receive busy straight away if they try and call out of the operational hours of a particular phone in, the caller does not get charged for the call when they receive a busy tone.

Forwarding a Service

All of the calls for a specific Service may be forwarded to another phone number. This facility is designed for customers that wish to forward lines to voicemail (see Call Recording earlier in this manual), or perhaps to another site.

To forward a service:
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To check what number services are being forwarded to, go back into services and it will state ‘Forwarded to xxxxxxxxxx’ in there.

Service Call Capacity

The Service Call Capacity facility allows you to limit how many calls are allowed to be present in a Service simultaneously. This is useful where a limited number of ‘real lines’ are shared between two stations. If for example you had 8 real lines, and two stations, AM and FM, you can control here how many calls each station was allowed to receive. It might be that you wanted to receive up to 6 calls during the morning period on the FM service, and only 2 on the AM service, but later in the day you may want to receive equal numbers to each service. The Service Call Capacity facility allows users with limited line resources to make the best use of their line capacity. See below:



In the above example we assume there are 7 real lines. The Phone In may receive up to 6 calls and the XD (ex-directory private studio telephone) may receive one call only. As there are 7 real lines and these have been allocated between the one full service and the one mini service (mini service is a service not used for full phone ins and can only be 1 or 2 lines), there is no danger that any Service will overflow and take all of the 7 lines.

If on the other hand a first come, first served system was required, each of the Services could be set to the number of real lines connected to the system. In this case, calls for either Service would be allowed through until all 7 real lines had been used. At this point, additional calls for any Service would result in a busy tone.

To set a capacity for a Service:

Re-opening a Service

The Open facility is used to cancel a Busy or Forward mode set on a Service. To Open a service follow this procedure: