Call transferring/routing questions

[pendo]

Hello,

OK, here's the scenario:  We are a very small business that has 2 facilities.  Our management office is here where I am, and we have a very small manufacturing facility/satellite office (2 full time, 1 part time employee) ~150 miles away. Now the remote location doesn't receive many phone calls, nor do they have to make many....they operate just fine with a single voice line and a fax. 

I won't bore you with the reasons why I'm needing to do this, but I'd like to know how I could set it all up where when someone calls their line, it routes instead to my office where one of us would answer...then we could transfer the call to the satellite office.  I would like them to still be able to call out just fine, but it can't a direct dial number to that device which would bypass my routing.

The primary goal is that I want to know when a call comes in for the satellite office, and there's a certain calling party that I want to know that we are answering all the phone lines now.  As for the fax line, I need control of it as well and I've been thinking about a FaxLogic or something along those lines.  In a perfect world I'd like to be able to keep all the same numbers, however it's not a deal breaker if I can't.


I'm thinking this should be simple with 2 obi devices, but I'm unsure of how I would do the routing particularly how to setup their outbound rules.  At my office we have an old Panasonic KX-TA824 system that I'd like to tie the obi into, but I'll have to free a line first.  For now, I'd probably just get another phone for the obi, as it would just be used to manage the calls to the remote office. 


Any advice is greatly appreciated, as I have NO experience with much of this.  We've been using our personal 110 at home for almost 2 years now and it's been great.   

-pendo

[jimates]

I will assume you have broadband service at the remote location.
So you use both of the SP trunks on your Obi110, or is one still open?

Inbound calls
With another Obi110 at the remote location you can set the inbound call route for the Line to only ring the Obi at your location**.

Outbound calls
Depending on how much you want to restrict their use, you can force all their outgoing calls through the AA. I would need to know more about what you desire for the outgoing calls.

Fax
Do they need both incoming and outgoing fax? I am not sure how much forwarding or bridging fax calls would interfere, if at all, with the fax. If you want to receive all faxes on your end you could port the number to a voip provider and then set that service up on your end.

Or to keep from paying the cost of the line service there, you could port that number to a voip service and set it up on a Obi on your end.
You can set the fax on the second SP and then use the Obitalk service for all calls between the 2 locations.
This depends on whether you currently use both service trunks on your 110, and whether you would want to add a Obi100 or another Obi110 at your current location.

You can set it where anytime they lift the handset (hot dialing) or if they press a digit (warm dialing) it will only ring your Obi. You can then transfer the call for them to their designated number.

Give me some more response to that and

**This would also mean a return call from the call center in response to a 911 call, would also only ring your Obi; unless the emergency call center had the same outgoing caller id for every call they make. But you would  have to get that number and then use it to direct only those calls to the phone port of the Obi110.

[Felix]

Can you set up "your" OBI to register for their phone number? Then all incoming calls will go straight to you. Google Voice and several other providers allow you to set up a caller id (after verification that it is really your number); so "their" outgoing calls will have correct caller id as well. And you can transfer the calls to them (when you choose) over, say OBiNet. All in all seems to be a fairly straightforward thing to do.

As far as faxing - I always recommend switching to online faxing service. Better document management, easier, less paper, and - most likely - cheaper. I looked at FaxLogic. I don't know your volume - our is similar to their Personal Virtual Fax Plan 500. We are using ExtremeFax and paying about a third less (actually, we are paying half the price; but it looks like they raised the prices recently). They also ported our phone number for free.

[pendo]

Yes, we have so-called broadband....it's DSL so not really up to snuff by today's standards but definitely sufficient for this application.  I do not have any obi devices yet at either office. 

I do need to send and receive faxes. I actually have been leaning in the direction of an online solution, as it would easily allow me to track activity.