Installation guide

Bridged Call Appearances Planning Applications and Services
8
ShoreTel 14.2 Planning and Installation Guide 149
Bridged Call Appearances
The Bridged Call Appearances (BCA) feature provides “bridged” information between many separate
IP phones, offering the benefit of faster call handling between users. The feature is intended for key
system environments, such as a small office with a moderate number of trunks, ShoreTel IP Phones,
and users.
Custom buttons are configured on each IP phone so that information about incoming calls to a BCA
extension is shared among the phones via blinking colored LEDs. Similarly, IP phones can share
information about outbound calls placed from a BCA extension by blinking green or red on each
phone. Refer to the ShoreTel System Administration Guide for details.
Custom buttons can be programmed on an IP phone such that each button represents a position in the
call stack.
Pressing the top-most BCA custom button for outbound calls does not necessarily access trunk 1.
There is no one-to-one correlation between the custom buttons programmed for BCA extensions and a
particular trunk. Trunks can be associated with BCA extensions in any manner specified by the system
administrator.
Switch Support for Bridged Call Appearances
The ShoreTel voice switches support BCA functionality with the following caveats:
 Up to 24 BCA extensions can be configured per switch.
 The sum of all the trunks that are assigned to a BCA, plus the call stack size of all BCAs used
for extension appearances on a switch cannot exceed 24. For example, you can configure 8
BCAs, each targeted with 3 trunks on the same switch.
 A maximum of 32 phones can be configured to point to the same BCA extension.
 Up to 128 BCA extensions on other switches can be monitored.
For details on configuring the BCA feature, refer to the ShoreTel System Administration Guide.
Hunt Groups
Hunt groups allow you to route calls to a list of extensions. Hunt groups can be accessed through an
extension, DID, and/or DNIS. Hunt groups are supported by ShoreTel Voice Switches and remain
available when connectivity to the ShoreTel servers is lost. The hunt group can be used as the backup
destination for a workgroup, which allows basic hunting even when the workgroup server is not
reachable. To maximize reliability, assign hunt groups to a switch close to the majority of the members
and/or trunks associated with the hunt group.
A maximum of 8 hunt groups can be assigned to a single switch. A total of 16 user numbers can be
assigned to hunt groups on a single switch — for example, 8 hunt groups with 2 extensions each, 2
hunt groups with 8 extensions, or 1 hunt group with 16 extensions.