Hi

I found teleflow after searching to use an onboard 56k modem as a answering machine / switchboard. The debt collectors and sales people for previous tennants have been driving us mad.

So.. I found teleflow, downloaded, got a switchboard working and it has to be said it's great!

Now.. I've hit a stumbling block: Hardware and setting it up.

Now.. I know I need a telephony board and from what I understand you can get them as PCI to slot into a PC.

So.. is that it? - or do I need one of these complex switchboard / pbx things?

How is it connected up? - Does the telephony board connect directly to the phone line? Do I plug in the phone into the telephony board or does the (if needed) pbx connect to the line, the phone to the pbx and the tel board to the pbx?

If you guys could give me a quick bit of info to help me get this clear in my mind I'd be very grateful.

Many thanks,

twinky

What you need usually depends on what all you are doing.

That said, you probably do not need a PBX to have the IVR do what you need.

Think of every line into the IVR as being just another phone on someone's desk. Generally, this means that anything you can do from a phone on a desk, you can do from a line connected to the telephony card (this is a most fair comparison if your desk phone is a simple analog phone and you have an analog telephony card with analog lines plugged into it).

You can't plug phones into the telephony card for transfers, because that would be similar to plugging two regular phone lines into one another and expecting to be able to "place calls" between them.

So, if you are looking at a front-end IVR to answer calls, then transfer them to other lines in the office, you could (this is just one example, and may not work for your scenario) have one hunt group that plugs into the IVR. (hunt group is just a group of lines where you call one phone number to reach the first line, which forwards when the line is busy to the second, and so on) Then, whenever someone calls in, and you decide where to direct their call, you can transfer them to the appropriate phone number. (and you would do exactly that, transfer the call from the IVR to a phone number of a phone in your office) You might set up rules like after X rings, try a different phone number (in case that desk isn't occupied) etc.

In this scenario, a flash-hook transfer is best, because it uses up less lines, and frees up the IVR line after the transfer is done.

We can recommend a card or cards, but it would help to know a little more about the volume of calls you are looking to handle before we do.

Hi Chris,

Basically it's not an office system this is just for a home call screening system. Our phone line is being plagued by debt collectors for people that had our number before us and so we had it changed to another number.. and now we get 3 times as many phone calls for 3 different people

So.. I found teleflow and decided it would be a neat idea to have some options for incoming calls like this:
Press one for <surname>
Press two for <surname>
Press three for <surname>
- All of those will then go to a message saying that the person no longer has this number and will then hangup the call.

Meanwhile option 5 (which isn't announced) is the option to be selected to ring through to the phone in our home (hence the queueing topic - it can play music while the phone is ringing).

So.. the setup is 1 analog phone line (I think its analogue? - It works with DTMF tones but also carries a ADSL signal for the internet) and a normal landline phone.

I figured that if someone selects option 5 then somehow teleflow could make the phone ring, when its answered then the incoming calls music can be stopped and the call patched through..

Can this be done? - I've got most of it setup and working via the simulator and it must be said teleflow has certainly made this all very easy.

You guys should make a version for smartphone users so they can decide how to handle their calls - you'd probably make a lot of money from an app for smartphones!

Unfortunately, what you're looking to do isn't currently possible with TeleFlow. (Well, it's possible, but for home use, the effort and costs would make it highly impractical)

Even the simplest solution I can suggest (an analog card, and two analog phone lines) isn't really practical, because there is no guarantee the second analog phone line won't ALSO have debt collectors calling.

I'm sorry to say it, but I don't think TeleFlow is going to be the answer you're looking for in this instance.

So is it not possible to plug in several phones to the telephony card and use them as internal extensions then?

How do big switchboards work inside call centres? - they don't have a phone line for every phone do they?

There are special telephony cards to do what you have suggested, but TeleFlow doesn't currently support them.

As for big switchboards inside call centres, no, they don't have to have an external phone line for each internal phone, but they generally do have one of those complex PBX/switches you mentioned before.

Hmm.. Ok thats a bit disappointing..

So what hardware will I need then to use teleflow in the manner I need? - I'm pretty good at bargain hunting on ebay and I'm on the local freecycle (with the recession and so many companies going down the pan there is bound to be some hardware out there somewhere). I'm not so fussed about buying some bargain hardware as I am about the continual calls - it's driving us mad.

I'd just prefer to filter them out and Teleflow seems ideal for designing that solution.

So.. what hardware should I get? - Do any of the supported analogue boards support the features I am looking for?

I can't really provide much advice in this respect.

Since TeleFlow doesn't have any support for the types of cards that allow you to have one inbound analog line coming in, with "extensions" you can ring off the card, you would have to go with one of the following alternatives:

1) A SIP/VoIP solution. In such a solution, you'd have the incoming analog line answered by an analog card, and you'd use TeleFlow and the SIP capabilities of another card to transfer qualified calls to a SIP/VoIP phone. I can tell you what hardware you'd want, but even after market, this hardware costs thousands.

2) You could find a PBX that can take an incoming analog line from your Telco, and that has multiple analog extensions off of it. Provided you could configure the PBX to push all calls to your main line to an extension plugged into TeleFlow, and TeleFlow could then transfer calls through the PBX to another extension in your house (your physical phone on which you will take your calls), you could do what you want to do. While we have worked in many such environments, I can't offer advice on particular PBXs. We leave all that up to the companies we work with. Provided they can provide us analog extensions that let us do transfers, we know TeleFlow can work with their equipment. We don't know how to configure or deal with issues with that equipment. So if you try this, you're on your own in terms of getting the PBX configured the way you want it.