If you have invested in a PBX and would like to use Ringio in an overlay manner (e.g. your customers call a number powered by Ringio but your employees answer the calls using their PBX-connected phones), this article explains how to do a simple mapping between your Ringio account / users / extensions and your PBX extensions.

How it works

1. Your customers dial your number (this number could be a Ringio Company Number, or a number that you forward / have ported to Ringio)
2. The Ringio service answers the call.
3. Your customer selects a department, (e.g. presses 3 for Sales) or an extension (presses 101 for Sam)
4. Your customer is placed on hold by Ringio
5. If your employees are using the Ringio Desktop or Ringio Mobile software, they get a screen pop.
6. Ringio dials your PBX trunk number, waits a little bit, then dials the extension of the corresponding employee, as specified in the Ringio Admin interface.
7. The PBX phone rings, the employee picks up
8. Ringio connects your customer who was holding and the employee who picked up.

What you need to do to make this approach work.

1. Make sure your customer calls are getting to Ringio. See:
   1. Can I use my current phone number with Ringio?
   2. Can I transfer my existing number to Ringio?
   3. How to port your phone number to Ringio
2. Make sure that there remains a number in your PBX trunk that Ringio can use to transfer the calls. E.g. if your published number was 703-555-1000 maybe you have 703-555-1001 still in the trunk, or your telecom provider can give you another number. This is the number that Ringio will privately dial to get back to your PBX
3. Enable extensions in Ringio. 
   1. Log in to the Administrator web interface
   2. From your Dashboard, click on "View Current Users"
   3. Then check the "Enable user extensions" checkbox

   

   4. Now enter the number of digits for your extensions as your employees have in your PBX. For example, if your employees have extensions like 101, 102, 103 then use 3 digits.

   

   5. Ringio automatically assigns extensions to each of your existing users following the digit scheme you selected, but you can override the specific extension assignments.

   

   6. Your "announced" extensions map to departments "E.g. press 1 for Sales, press 2 for Marketing" and those are managed in the "Departments" tab.

   

4. Format each user endpoint to map to the PBX
   1. Click on the row for a user in the "Users" tab
   2. In the field, "Receive Calls At:" use the following format: Trunk number x Extension.
      1. Basic format: Eg: "703-555-0000 x100"
      2. Advanced format: see below

Advanced Extension Format

You can use lowercase 'x' or uppercase 'X' to indicate the extensions.

You can still use spaces, parentheses and dashes, before specifying the extension.

You can also customize some other variables.There are 3 core variables that are involved in dialing extensions. They are:

1. ExtensionDialDelay (d) = This is the time between that a call is connected to the pbx and when the first dtmf entry is sent - the pbx extension.  The default value is 3 seconds. 
2. Pause (p) = This is the time between the digits when sending extensions. Default is 200 msec
3. Length (l) = the length of time that each dtmf tone is played. Default is 100 msec

Some advanced examples. In the examples 7035550000 is the pbx main number and 8793 is the extension

• Bare Minimum Example: 7035550000x8793 . (ExtensionDialDelay is 3 seconds, pause is 200 msec. length is 100 msec)
• Customize Delay Example: 7035550000x8793;d=5 (ExtensionDialDelay is 5 seconds, pause is 200 msec. length is 100 msec)
• Customize Everything: 7035550000x8793;d=7;p=300;l=200 (ExtensionDialDelay is 7 seconds, pause is 300 msec. length is 200 msec)

d=7;p=300;l=200 - these parameters can be any order of course and in any combination and are optional.