How to schedule forwarding to an outside phone on holidays and weekends

[Bobcat250]

Hi folks;

My company has a Mitel 5000 system. During the normal work week, calls to our customer service department go directly to the inside customer rep helpdesk. However, on holidays and weekends, we would like to setup a schedule so that service calls (only during certain hours during that particular day/weekend) will automagically forward to an outside phone located at another location. For example; on Saturdays and Sundays, our customer service hours are 8:00 am to 11:00 am. How can we setup the forwading so calls, to our service department, will only go the external phone during those hours? The rest of the time, they will default back to our service desk.

This same scenario would be on holidays, such as Memorial Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc. It would be helpful if there was an easy way to set this up so it could be done "on the fly" so to speak.

This software is not very intuitive, so any help would be appreciate 

Thanks! 

Dan

[acejavelin]

This is can be done in a variety of ways, but all would involve using a STAR Routing application and a few CRA's in the voicemail... if you are not familiar with this it can be a little confusing, in your Mitel 5000 go to Voicemail-Devices-Applications and press F1 to bring up the help and read up on STAR.

Even the most veteran technicians sometimes struggle with STAR applications, they are a top down, first match set of rules that point calls to other routing elements (such as Auto Attendants or Call Routing Applications) to handle routing of calls based on time, day, date, day/night mode or other specific requirements.

To be honest, I generally recommend NOT trying to do this by yourself the first time... there are many rules and tricks that can easily be gotchas that don't show up until it's too late since testing is difficult at best since it all based on specific date/time rules that are difficult to reproduce.

[NTEDave]

If you want to do it on the fly the easiest way would be to setup a night service that rings to one phone, then simply call forward that phone to an external destination.

If you want it more structured and calls will always be going to the same destination at the same times and days use STARS, CRAs and Phantoms to achieve what you want.

As Ace says it can get a bit involved so you will probably want to involve your installer.

[Bobcat250]

Thanks guys; you confirmed my suspicions that our phone support vendor will need to get involved.  The manuals are as cryptic and unintelligable as the software is confusing.

Again, many thanks for your prompt and helpful responses!   

Dan