Does anyone know if the Avaya B159 conference phone supports the "Dial Direct" / "Voice Call" feature (A.K.A. the ability to dial a short-code and extension, and have the receiving phone auto answer)?
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Are you asking if the B159 can make auto-answer calls or whether it can auto-answer calls? Your question wasn't very clear.
If this relates to new parties joining an existing conference then it won't help. Auto-answering a new call while the phone already has a conference in progress will treat the two as separate calls (ie. the B159's connection to the conference call would be put on hold whilst the new calls was answered).
Depending on what telephone system your B159 is connected to that telephone system probably has features that allow callers to join an existing conference. -
So, we're using 9608 phones with IP Office Manager version 9.0.4.0 build 965.
The 9608 phones have the ability to "direct dial" another phone that supports the feature. The function's short code is specified in IP Office Manager. So pretty much, I can dial *63*N# with the *63 being the shortcode and N the extension. Instead of ringing the extension, the extension will immediately answer the phone even if no one is there.
We're looking into purchasing B159 phones, but we want it to support the same feature - as in people will be able to dial into the B159 phones with the shortcode, and the B159 should automatically answer because it supports direct dial.
I've spent hours trying to ask Avaya directly about this, but I can't seem to get a hold of anybody that knows anything, or I'm just pointed back to the data sheet listed on their website that tells me nothing. It has been incredibly frustrating, and I just want to be able to know if we should buy these phones or not. It doesn't seem to be something handled directly by IP Office, because we've tried two Polycom conference phones, one SIP and one analog, and neither worked with dial direct (both receiving and sending the direct dial call).Comment
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Splitting it into two parts then:
1) Make direct voice calls: Yes
The B159 user will be able to make direct voice calls using any short codes configured in the system for that function.
2) Auto Answer direct voice calls: No
As far as I'm aware the B159 cannot auto-answer calls. It will treat such calls as normal calls and ring instead.
As an analog phone it can't receive indication from the telephone system that any particular call is one it should auto-answer (it sees all incoming calls are being the same regardless of whether a direct dial feature has been used or not). That also means it isn't included in page calls from the system. Nor, from a quick scan of the B159 user guide, does it have any setting of its own to enable auto-answering of all calls.Comment
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Okay! Thank you so much! I'm assuming that the dial direct feature is something interpreted directly by the H.323 protocol on our 9608 phones then. I just wasn't sure if it was a feature proprietary to Avaya. The thing that confuses me most though is that we had old Nortel phones running under Avaya's Business Communications Mangager that had the same feature under a slightly different name. The thing is, they were all analog phones. Could have been a feature proprietary to them, but I still find it odd.
Nonetheless, I'm going to have see if I can't find a decent H.323 conference phone or figure out how to translate the feature to a SIP phone somehow.Comment
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