Flu Pandemic Contingency Planning

Here’s hoping we won’t need any of the following instructions:

Account Administrators: If you’re an Avid Communications client and you subscribe to our Hosted PBX service, you can convert any office phone for use at home with a few simple steps. This can be used during a pandemic to allow people to minimize their chances of exposure to the virus by working at home. Because the phone will function generally as it does in the office, this can be used to maintain business operations even when people are advised not to come to work.

Note that any group functions, call flows, automated attendant, transfers, conferencing calling features will continue to function exactly as they did when the phone is in the office.

Because the phone will not be on the Avid network, where we control call quality, the user might experience some problems with call quality because high-speed cable service often has limited upstream capacity, and therefore you might see some call clipping, garbled calls or dropped calls if the home cable network experiences congestion.

If you would like to set up a Contingency Plan for your business, please contact us at 816-994-7050. We will need to know who would potentially move their phones from the office and the address where the phone would be relocated. We will store that information in your company’s records, which would prepare us for implementing your customized Contingency Plan.

In the event you desire to invoke the Contingency Plan, we would need 48 hours notice, as we are required by law to reconfigure the E911 records associated with the phone lines so that in the event of an emergency call, the public safety authorities will respond to the correct address.

The instructions for reconfiguring the phone are as follows:

1. You must have the administrative password that allows changes to the phone station configuration. That password will be given only to the Account Administrator in accordance with Avid’s standard procedures that protect customer proprietary network information (which is an Federal Communications mandate). If you are the designated Account Administrator and need the station administrative password, please contact us at 816-994-7050.
2. Log onto the phone using a web browser and the phone’s IP address. You will need to do this while on the company’s network (either in the office or while logged in remotely using your VPN service).
3. Under “Setup/Advanced”, click on “QoS/Security.” Enter the password in “Administrator Login:” and “Save.” The station is now in administrative mode.
4. The “Setup” menu will now show a number of “Identities.” For each active identity (which you can see by clicking on the Identity and noting whether “Identity active:” is On or Off), change the last three digits of the Outbound Proxy setting (on the Identity’s Main, or Login page) to “230” and “Save.” Make sure you don’t navigate away from this page without saving or the change won’t be made. Make this same change for all active identities.
5. Unplug the phone and if it has a power cord, take the power cord too.
6. Take the phone (and power cord) home and plug into an ethernet port on your cable modem. You may plug your home computer into the PC port on the phone. The phone requires a broadband connection (DSL or cable modem) and a wired connection.
7. To take the phone back to the office, repeat the same steps while at home, except restore the original three digits in the Outbound Proxy field.

Here is an incomplete list of important features that will work regardless of the phone’s location:

• All lines on the phone
• Transfer
• Park Orbits
• On Hold
• Hunt Groups
• Voice Mail (including indicator light)
• Caller ID (inbound and outbound)
• Three-way calling
• Find-Me, Follow-Me and SimRing features
• Extension Monitoring