News:

On Tuesday September 6th the forum will be down for maintenance from 9:30 PM to 11:59 PM PDT

Main Menu

How to Optimize 2 OBI200's for a Small Office

Started by alkinga, December 18, 2017, 07:17:53 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

alkinga

We have been using an OBI200 with Google Voice for about a year now to run our small office.  The one downside is that if one person is on the OBI200 connected phone we can't make or receive any calls. 

We found one workaround. We installed the GV app on our iPhones and if we make or receive the call through the app we can still make and receive new/separate calls on our Obi configured phone through the same GV number (this was a life saver). 

In an effort to further expand I decided to buy a second OBI200 for the office.  Any advice on the best way to configure these devices to work in parallel?

I bought a 2 line office phone with hopes that it would be as easy as just plugging each OBI200 into the two ports.  This, of course, did not work.

Next I plan to setup a brand new GV number and then just use the new GV number on the new OBI200.  The intent is we would primarily just use the *extension feature to transfer calls to the second (new) Obi device with the new number.

Is this the best way to use the two devices?

My goals are:
First) To accept as many calls through our main business GV # as possible (in a perfect world that we be 100% of calls to that number)
Second) Ideally we would like to make all calls through that same GV number (so that when it shows up on the caller ID they see that it is our business and they call back our main line if need be.

I am not sure we can do both, but if you have any advise on things that work for you please let me know.

Any and all help is most appreciated!

SteveInWA

Hi:

OBi 200 series devices support up to four separate Google accounts per device, and multiple OBi devices can be authorized to the same Google account(s).  In other words, you can easily have both GV numbers set up on SP1 and SP2 on both OBis. 

You said that connecting the two OBis to the two-line phone didn't work.  It should simply work.  One possible issue is that most two-line phones have two jacks:  one jack supports four-wire phone cords for two separate lines (L1 + L2), and the other jack just supports a two-wire cord for L2.  Use two, two-wire/two-gold pin telephone cords; one for each OBi, and plug the cords into the two jacks on the phone.  If the phone has a switch that controls the way those two jacks are used (L1 only vs L1 +L2) then make sure that the 4-pin jack is only being used for L1.

OBi #1 <---two-conductor, two-pin cord--->L1 jack on phone
OBi #2 <---two-conductor, two-pin cord--->L2 jack on phone