Set up calendar-based forwarding and spoken absence

This information is primarily for administrators and/or people who manage Zylinc solutions

When people are away, the Zylinc solution can forward the inquiries they get to others, such as a colleague or the reception, so that the inquiries don't go unanswered.

The forwarding can either happen automatically, based on people's calendars, or people can manually set up forwarding in their Zylinc clients.

The way in which people manually set up forwarding depends on which Zylinc client they use:

Instead of forwarding calls to others, you can use the spoken absence feature. It's a service that automatically tells the caller that the person they called is unable to answer. Optionally, it can also tell the caller when the person is expected to be back, based on the person's calendar appointments and work hours.

It works like this: People who want to use spoken absence forward their calls to a special spoken absence number that the administrator sets up in the Zylinc Administration Portal. Callers will then hear the an announcement about the absence of the person they've called. Optionally, callers can get an IVR menu with some or all of these options:

  • Leave a voicemail message

  • Make the Zylinc solution send an e-mail to the receiver with basic information about the call

  • Make the Zylinc solution forward the call to another number (for example reception or a colleague)

The person who's away can also get an SMS text message with basic information about the call.

  1. In the Zylinc Administration Portal, select INSTALL > Portal Configuration. In the Pages section, verify that Spoken Absence is selected. If not, select it, and click Save.

  2. Select FORWARDING > Spoken Absence. In the lower part of the page, click Add Spoken Absence Configuration.

  3. In the Settings section, in Number, enter a number that people in your organization who want to use this spoken absence configuration should forward their calls to. The number is like a number for your voice queues; for more information see Set up the prerequisites.

  4. In Workhours, specify the work hours of your organization, and whether work hours include weekends.

    If multiple people are going to use spoken absence, and they have different work hours, you can set up multiple spoken absence configurations, and assign a different phone number for each configuration.

    Optionally, in the Missed call SMS field, select if people should automatically get an SMS text message when they get calls while spoken absence is on.

  5. In the IVR General Settings section, specify information that'll determine what callers will hear when they call a person who's away:

    • Language: Select the language to use for the announcement that callers will hear.

      If you need more than one language, you can set up additional spoken absence configurations

    • Autoforward: If you only plan to offer callers one option (for example the option to leave a voicemail message), there's not much point in doing that trough an IVR menu. That's why you can select to automatically forward callers to the option in question.

    • Announce Availability: Spoken absence informs the caller that the person they called is unable to answer. Optionally, it can also tell the caller when the person is expected to be back, based on the person's calendar appointments and work hours.

      Calendar appointments must end within the reasonable future. If you set up a very long period of absence for a user, for example longer than a month, the system will not be able to tell when the user is expected to be back.

      If you mark calendar appointments with Free or Tentative, the system will ignore those appointments.

      When you enable availability announcements, they're constructed based on combinations of the following:

      • Pre-Available: The first part of the availability announcement. The - Default - is The person you're calling ... (in the language that you selected earlier).
      • Available from: The last part of the availability announcement, in cases where the called person has an entry in their calendar when they get the call. This, together with the called person's work hours, makes it possible to calculate when they will be available again. The - Default - is ... will be available from ... followed by the calculated point in time (in the language that you selected earlier).
      • Not available: The last part of the availability announcement, in cases where the called person doesn't have an entry in their calendar when they get the call. When the person doesn't have a calendar entry, it's not possible to calculate when they'll be available again. However, because of the fact that they've forwarded their calls to the spoken absence number, it's safe to assume that they're not going to answer. The - Default - is ... is currently unavailable (in the language that you selected earlier).

    • Attempts: If you plan to offer callers an IVR menu, you can specify a limit for how many attempts callers should get at making a choice by pressing a valid digit. If they don't manage to make a choice within the allowed number of attempts, the default action (see the following) is taken.

    • Default action: The action to take if a caller doesn't make a choice in an IVR menu, or if the caller doesn't manage to press a valid digit within the allowed number of attempts.

      If you want another default action than to end the call (Hangup), the required action must be enabled. For example, Offer Voicemail (see the following) must be selected for the default action Voicemail to work.

  6. In the Voicemail Settings section you can enable an IVR menu choice that asks if the caller would like to leave a voicemail.

    You must use IVR digit 1 for this IVR option.

  7. In the Forward Call Settings section you can enable an IVR menu choice that asks if the caller would like to be forwarded to another number.

    You must use IVR digit 2 for this IVR option.

  8. In the Mail Notification Settings section you can enable an IVR menu choice that asks the if caller would like to send an e-mail with information about the call.

  9. You must use IVR digit 3 for this IVR option.

When people in your organization want to use spoken absence, they simply forward their phone to the phone number that you have set up for the spoken absence configuration they want to use.

You can use spoken absence together with calendar based forwarding, described in the following, and set up the system to automatically add or remove forwards on phones when certain appointments exist in peoples' calendars.

When you call a person and that persons' phone is forwarded to a spoken absence configuration, Zylinc Media Server picks up the call and looks up the called phone number in the SIP protocol headers of the call.

If the Media Server can't find a person with that number, it plays back a message that says "The person you have called is currently unavailable."

If the Media Server finds a user with that number, it looks in the person's calendar, and plays back a message that says when the user is expected to be back, based on the first available time in the calendar, within the specified work hours.

Before you can use calendar-based forwarding, you must have a calendar integration. If you don't have one, you can, for example, set up Office 365 & Exchange Server calendar synchronization.

Before you can use calendar-based forwarding, you need to set up integration to a PBX. For examples of PBX integrations, see Set up Cisco telephony or Set up Skype for Business telephony.

For the phones that you want to use calendar-based forwarding for, make sure that their line state icons are visible in your Zylinc client software, and that the icons update correctly when the phones ring, become busy, etc. Later, you're going to use the icons to verify that the calendar-based forwarding works.

When you're going to use the Zylinc Administration Portal to set up rules for calendar-based forwarding and spoken absence, you're typically going to apply those rules to departments.

Because of that, it's a good idea to make sure that the users who are going to use calendar-based forwarding or spoken absence have a value assigned to their department field in Active Directory or your CSV import. Alternatively, the users should belong to a department in Cisco or BroadWorks.

This is how to get such a list of the department names that you're going to use:

The department names that you are going to set up in the Administration Portal are the names from the users' department field in Active Directory.

In Active Directory, departments are not the same as organizational units. To view or edit the Active Directory department for a user, you can do the following:

  1. In Active Directory Users and Computers, go to the user
  2. Select the Organization tab
  3. In the Department field, make sure that a department has been specified for all the users who are going to use forwarding or spoken absence

  1. On a domain controller, or on another computer where the Active Directory PowerShell Module is available, type the following command in PowerShell:

    Copy 
    get-aduser -filter * -Properties Department|select Department -Unique|where Department -ne $null|Sort-Object Department

  1. On a domain controller, or on another computer where the Active Directory PowerShell Module is available, type the following command in PowerShell:

    Copy 
    get-aduser -filter * -Properties Department|select Department -Unique|where Department -ne $null|Sort-Object Department|%{
    $dep=$_.Department
    get-aduser -Filter "Department -eq ""$dep""" -Properties Department,DisplayName,EmailAddress,DistinguishedName|select Department,DisplayName,EmailAddress,DistinguishedName|Sort-Object DisplayName}

  1. In SQL server Management Studio, click New Query

  2. Copy the following SQL code into the query window, and replace the word ZyDB with the name of your ZyDB database:

    Copy 
    use ZyDB
    -- View a list of departments for all Active Directory or CSV users
    select department,ut.name as user_type,* from usr u
    join usr_type ut on u.usr_type_id=ut.usr_type_id
    where usr_id not in (select distinct usr_id from bw_usr_services) and ut.name<>'ZyCallQueue' and ut.name<>'Group'
    order by u.department
    -- View a list of all departments for all Active Directory or CSV users
    select distinct department as 'all departments'  from usr u
    join usr_type ut on u.usr_type_id=ut.usr_type_id
    where usr_id not in (select distinct usr_id from bw_usr_services) and department<>'' and ut.name<>'ZyCallQueue' and ut.name<>'Group'
    order by u.department

  3. Press F5 to execute the Query

The department names that you're going to set up in the Administration Portal come in the department column in your CSV file.

Because of that, you need to make sure that your CSV file contains a department column, and that you've set up a mapping between that column and the department field in the Zylinc solution. For more information, see Import users, groups, and keywords from CSV file.

  1. In SQL server Management Studio, click New Query

  2. Copy the following SQL code into the query window, and replace the word ZyDB with the name of your ZyDB database:

    Copy 
    use ZyDB
    -- View a list of departments for all Active Directory or CSV users
    select department,ut.name as user_type,* from usr u
    join usr_type ut on u.usr_type_id=ut.usr_type_id
    where usr_id not in (select distinct usr_id from bw_usr_services) and ut.name<>'ZyCallQueue' and ut.name<>'Group'
    order by u.department
    -- View a list of all departments for all Active Directory or CSV users
    select distinct department as 'all departments'  from usr u
    join usr_type ut on u.usr_type_id=ut.usr_type_id
    where usr_id not in (select distinct usr_id from bw_usr_services) and department<>'' and ut.name<>'ZyCallQueue' and ut.name<>'Group'
    order by u.department

  3. Press F5 to execute the Query

For Cisco, the department names that you're going to set up in the Administration Portal must match the department column in the table vtm_user in the ZyDB database.

  1. In SQL server Management Studio, click New Query

  2. Copy the following SQL code into the query window, and replace the word ZyDB with the name of your ZyDB database:

    Copy 
    use zydb
    -- View a list of all departments in Cisco
    select distinct department as 'all departments' from vtm_user
    where department<>''
    order by department
    -- View a list of departments for all Cisco users
    select * from vtm_user
    order by department,first_name,last_name

  3. Press F5 to execute the Query

To view department names from BroadWorks:

  1. In SQL server Management Studio, click New Query

  2. Copy the following SQL code into the query window, and replace the word ZyDB with the name of your ZyDB database:

    Copy 
    use ZyDB
    -- View a list of departments for all BroadWorks users/huntgroups, etc.
    select department,ut.name as user_type,* from usr u
    join usr_type ut on u.usr_type_id=ut.usr_type_id
    where usr_id in (select distinct usr_id from bw_usr_services)
    order by u.department
    -- View a list of all departments for all BroadWorks users/huntgroups, etc.
    select distinct department as 'all departments'  from usr u
    join usr_type ut on u.usr_type_id=ut.usr_type_id
    where usr_id in (select distinct usr_id from bw_usr_services) and department<>''
    order by u.department
    -- Technical information: For BroadWorks, the department names you set up in the Administration Portal for forwarding must match the department column for the rows in the usr table in the ZyDB database that originate from BroadWorks.
    -- Those rows will have at least one many-to-one relation from the foreign key usr_id column in the table bw_usr_services to the primary key usr_id column in the usr table.

  3. Press F5 to execute the Query

  1. In the Administration Portal menu, select Install > Portal Configuration

  2. In the Pages section's Forwarding section, select Forwarding, and click Save

  3. In the Administration Portal menu, select FORWARDING > Connection Settings

  4. In the Forwarding Server Settings section, select Activate Forwarding Server

  5. In Server Address, enter the IP address or hostname of the Zylinc Windows Application Server, for example: winappserver

  6. In the Forwarding PBX Control section, select the PBX types that you're going to use

  7. If you're going to use departments from Active Directory, or if you use Skype for Business, select Use AD Department in the Forwarding Rules section

    If you're going to use departments from Cisco or BroadWorks, clear Use AD Department in the Forwarding Rules section

  8. Click Save

A default department is useful when you don't want to set up specific rules for your specific departments, or when you need to set up rules for users that don't belong to any of the departments.

  1. In the Administration Portal menu, select FORWARDING > Departments

  2. Click Add Configuration Group

  3. In Department Name, type a name to use for your default department. For example, you can use the name Default department

    The name must not be in use, so you can't use a department name from the list of departments that you created in a previous step.

  4. In Calendar Forwarding Group, select - All -

  5. In Ignore Group, select - None -

  6. Click Save

  7. In the Administration Portal menu, select FORWARDING > Connection Settings

  8. In the Forwarding Rules section, select your Default Department

  9. Click Save

You can use your default department to apply all your forwarding rules. However, if you want to set up specific rules for one or more specific departments, you can do the following to add them.

When you add a configuration with a specific department name, the rules that you've set up for your default department will not be applied to users within that specific department.

  1. In the Administration Portal menu, select FORWARDING > Departments

  2. Click Add Configuration Group

  3. In Department Name, type the name of the first department from the list of departments that you need to set up specific forwarding rules for.

  4. In Calendar Forwarding Group, select - All -

  5. In Ignore Group, select - None -

  6. Click Save

  7. Repeat until you've added all the departments that you need

  1. In the Zylinc Deployment Manager menu, select Deployment > Installation
  2. In Installers, select Forwarding Activity Server, and click Install Applications
  3. In the Deployment Manager menu, select Deployment > Windows Services
  4. Click Refresh Services
  5. Select Forwarding Activity Server, and in Change Startup Type, select AutomaticDelayed, and then click Change Startup Type
  6. Select Forwarding Activity Server, and click Start Services

Now you can set up rules that use appointments in users' calendars to forward users' phones to the numbers that you specify.

Which appointments will result in forwarding?

For the appointments in users' calendars, the system uses start time, end time, and free/busy information to decide if a users' phone should be forwarded or not.

Example: If the time is 10:17, and an appointment begins at 10:00 and ends at 11:00, and the appointment isn't marked as Free or Tentative, the system will forward the user's phone to the specified number. When the appointment ends, the system will remove the forwarding.

Appointments must end within the reasonable future. If you need very long periods of absence for a user, for example longer than a month, we recommend that you use a permanent forward. To set up a permanent forward, in the Administration Portal menu, select FORWARDING > Departments, go to the relevant department, click CONTROL in the top-right corner, and set up a Permanent forward.

Categories

You can enhance your rules to also include the categories of appointments. This is useful when you don't want to unconditionally forward during appointments that aren't marked as Free or Tentative. For example, you can set up a rule that forwards a user's phone to the reception only when there is an active calendar appointment categorized as vacation in that users' calendar.

Departments

You can set up rules for specific departments. If a user doesn't belong to any department, or if you haven't set up any rules for a users' department, the system will optionally use the rules from the default department that you set up earlier.

Rules for the optional default department aren't used if a department-specific rule exists for a users' department.

In this example we'll forward users' phones to number 1000 when there's an active calendar appointment categorized as vacation in the users' calendars:

  1. In the Administration Portal, select FORWARDING > Departments.

  2. In the previous, you created a default department and optionally other departments that match your organization. Click the name of the department for which you want to use the calendar-based forwarding rule.

  1. Click CATEGORIES, in the top-right corner.

  2. In Category Match, enter the name of the category that users must add to their calendar appointments for the forward to become active, in this case vacation.

  3. In Forwarding Number, enter the phone number that you want to forward users' phones to, in this case 1000.

  4. Click Add.

If you need it, you can add more categories or phone numbers to the rules for this department.

You can also repeat the procedure and set up similar rules for other departments.

The system will ignore calendar appointments that are marked as Free or Tentative.

In this example, we'll forward users' phones to number 1000 for all calendar appointments, no matter if they are categorized or not, except when the category is NoForward:

  1. In the Administration Portal, select FORWARDING > Departments.

  2. In the previous, you created a default department and optionally other departments that match your organization. Click the name of the department for which you want to use the calendar-based forwarding rule.

  1. To make sure that all appointments gets forwarded regardless of their category, click CATEGORIES and delete any categories that you or somebody else have previously set up.
  2. Click POLICIES in the top-right corner.
  3. In Default Forwarding, enter the phone number that you want to forward users' phones to, in this case 1000.
  4. In No Forwarding, add the name of the category that you want to exclude, in this case NoForward

If you need it, you can add more categories to exclude from the rules for this department.

You can also repeat the procedure and set up similar rules for other departments.

The system will ignore calendar appointments that are marked as Free or Tentative.

If you specify categories in CATEGORIES, and at the same time specify a Default Forwarding in POLICIES, only appointments that don’t match a specified category will be forwarded to the number specified in Default Forwarding.

You can include a phone number in a category, so that if the category applies, the user's phone will be forwarded to the number in question. In this example, we'll forward a user's phone to number 1234, if the calendar appointment is categorized as fwd:1234:

  1. In the Administration Portal, select FORWARDING > Departments.

  2. In the previous, you created a default department and optionally other departments that match your organization. Click the name of the department for which you want to use the calendar-based forwarding rule.

  1. Click POLICIES in the top-right corner

  2. In Dynamic Forwarding, add the category that you want to use when you need to specify the number to forward to, as a part of the category.

    Example: If you want to use the category fwd:1234 to forward the phone to 1234, add fwd:

If you need it, you can add more dynamic forwarding categories to include to the rules for this department.

You can also repeat the procedure and set up similar rules for other departments.

The system will ignore calendar appointments that are marked as Free or Tentative.