(Quick off-topic note: did some setting on VoiceOps mailman get changed halfway through the morning? "From:" now shows voiceops list address instead of original sender's -- which I'm fine with -- but then "Reply-To" is getting added and set to sender. So I now have to add voiceops address to "To:" or "CC:" manually if I want my reply to go to the list. Not cool.) Hunter Fuller wrote:
Look. I get that the dial-9 thing is not how you would build a system today, but what I'm trying to say is this: If the current way worked for decades, through multiple phone system forklifts, enabling us to not retrain our users; and if 988 is the first time we have ever had any issue with it; then at what point Exactly were we "supposed to" have "seen the light" and migrated away from it? And what value would it have brought us at that time?
It's not like our users are constantly getting confused by this. We dispatch an email to new employees with basics on using the phone, and not once has anyone ever found it confusing or difficult. Some of these users will have dialed their desk phone the exact same way for THIRTY YEARS (not an exaggeration). What value does it bring me to shake it up, aside from giving them the ability to dial 988 without a delay? Is there even one other benefit? I am genuinely grasping here.
I'm generally sympathetic with this position, actually. As I said before, I prefer *not* to replace customers' existing phone systems, and that way there is no re-training nor taking on the role of supporting a replacement system. And if/when we do replace somebody's aging PBX, I want to remove as much friction as possible and add as few things to the canned training spiel as possible: get in, install the thing, show somebody the basic ropes as quickly as possible and with as few disclaimers as possible, and get out. We have a tough enough time just with things like "this is how voicemail now works" and "sorry no, we are *not* going to try to emulate your outgoing key system: you must now either do extension-to-extension transfer, or call parking", heh. So if it is relatively easy to accommodate older (and established/habitual) usage patterns alongside newer ones all without creating tons of extra work for us, we will. Carlos Alvarez wrote:
Right, and their switch traps the 9 so you don't have to route it. I may be mistaken, but thought the original question was about routing on a modern switch, where the 9 is not relevant.
I went back & read through the prior posts, and can't find anything that affirms your assumption. Yes agreed, in the particular scenario I laid out there, we don't have to worry about the 9. What I was responding to, though, was your rhetorical question re: whether "there [is] really a switch out there in use today that needs [an outside line prefix]", and pointing out that at least anecdotally, yeah: there are plenty. I gather that there are many "operators" of all stripes that subscribe to this list: systems integrators, service providers, a little of columns A and B, etc. And though the OP himself didn't say one way or the other, there are clearly people responding to this thread who are actively supporting older systems.
Weird, pretty much every old PBX I ran into had the fax lines on it, and sometimes even alarm lines on it. One of my early trainings with alarm panel integration, in the 90s, was all about coordinating the dial-9 rules.
I'm old, and maybe you mean more recently. I know we did a dial 9 in the early 2000s, now I can't remember when most people dropped it.
I am mostly talking about customers whose dialtone we took over servicing within the last 10 years. But these were also phone systems that had been installed 5-10 years or more prior to when we got there, sooo... I guess I should clarify that the vast, vast majority of these are small businesses in a fairly rural context. Typically with maybe 3-4 POTS trunks, including the fax line. (And yes, often we will see alarm circuit sharing a line with fax. Just that neither are touching the main KSU at all, and [thus] have no shared line appearances on any of the handsets.) Heck, at our own office, before we moved over to all-IP, our prior system which had been installed in the early 2000s was a Nortel MICS with roughly 16 POTS trunks (why it wasn't T1, no clue...this whole thing was installed well before my time). Same situation: fax line completely separate. -- Nathan