Offices and front desks

A studio, a workshop, a clinic’s back office or a small company needs desk phones that reach each other and a front desk that someone always answers, not a phone contract.

What it does

• Extensions and a directory. Everyone gets a short number (201); search people, desk phones, rooms and groups by name.
• Ring groups. “Front desk” or “Support” rings everyone at once, one after another, or in turns. Nobody answers? The caller leaves a message in the group’s shared voicemail, marked “heard by” whoever plays it first.
• Business hours. After hours a group goes to voicemail, or to a night line.
• A lobby phone. An idle Lounge phone in reception can have a house-line key that rings a whole group, the people on duty, at once (first to answer takes it), so visitors lift the handset and press one key.
• Desk phones and hot desks. A personal desk phone is always its owner; a Lounge phone on a hot desk is whoever signed in, until the end of the day if you set sessions that way.
• A public line. Publish “Support” or “Orders” at its own address (orders@your.server) so anyone on any server can call without connecting first: callers wait in line with their place shown, can leave a voicemail instead, and you can block people or whole servers. Off until an admin turns it on. See Public lines.
• Call log, audit trail and transfer, across servers inside your space. Recording is available, off by default and always announced.

There is no connection to the regular phone network: people reach you by extension, by your address (you@your.server) or as a connection.

A doorbell at the door (labs)

The labs firmware has a doorbell mode: any key on the door phone rings the phones inside with the door’s name, and whoever lifts talks to the visitor. It runs on your own Wi-Fi with no server. Tested on a computer, not yet on a real board.

Start

1. Get started, then create a Team or Organization space.
2. Follow A phone system for your team.
3. Publish a ring group as a public line if customers should reach it.
4. Put a Lounge phone at reception, and read about call recording if you need it.

For a business, run your own server: on Cloudflare or with Docker.