Everyday Features and Personal Settings
Dashboard
Your Dashboard at a Glance
The Dashboard is the first page you see after signing in, and it gives you a quick summary of your phone line without having to open any other page.
Three cards summarize the essentials: how many voicemail messages are waiting for you, how many calls appear in your recent call list, and how many devices — phones or apps — are currently registered to your line and able to receive calls. If any of these numbers look wrong (for example, no devices are registered even though your phone is switched on), that’s usually the first sign to check your phone’s own connection settings, or to contact your operator.
Quick Actions
A small grid icon near the top of the page opens a menu of quick actions you can take without navigating anywhere else — for instance, sending a fax straight away. It’s simply a shortcut to something you could also reach through the regular menu, covered in Sending a Fax.
Making Calls
Starting a Call From Your Browser
The Start new call page lets you place a call directly from your web browser, without picking up a handset. Type the number you want to reach into the field and select the call button that appears.
The first time you do this, your browser will ask permission to use your microphone — this is expected, and needed for the call’s audio to work. If you decline by mistake, your browser’s own settings let you allow it again for this website.
This browser-based calling is a convenient way to call back a number you see in your history (covered in the following chapters) even when you’re away from your desk phone, but it does not replace your regular phone or app: calls that come in while your browser isn’t open will still ring on your other registered devices, listed in Registered Devices.
Answering an Incoming Call
When somebody calls your number, the Start new call entry in the side menu turns into an alert showing who’s calling, and a green button to answer or a red button to decline appears at the bottom of the screen.
You don’t need to be on that particular page to see it: the same accept and decline buttons follow you as a banner docked at the bottom of the screen no matter which page of the portal you’re currently looking at — for example the Dashboard.
Controls During a Call
Once a call connects, the side menu shrinks down to icons only, giving the call itself the whole screen. A row of buttons along the bottom lets you control it: mute/unmute your microphone, put the call on hold, turn your camera on/off, share your screen with the other party, mute/unmute the speaker, and hang up.
Using the Keypad During a Call
Selecting the small keypad symbol next to the "In call with…" indicator opens a number pad over the call, letting you send a tone for each key you press. This is what you need whenever the person or system on the other end asks you to "press 1 for…", or asks for a PIN or extension number once you’re already connected — for example when reaching a colleague’s voicemail or an automated menu.
Conversations
Your Call and Voicemail History
The Conversations page keeps a record of everything that has happened on your line: calls you made or received, voicemail messages. The ALL tab shows everything together, in the order it happened, together with how long each call lasted and, where billing applies, what it cost.
Two further tabs — CALLS and VOICEMAILS - narrow the list down to just one type of activity. A date range at the top of the page lets you look further back than the most recent entries.
Acting on a Call
Selecting the three dots next to any entry in the ALL or CALLS tab opens a menu of things you can do with that specific call: call the number back, add it to your phonebook, or block it — either just incoming calls from that number, just outgoing calls to it, or both.
Blocking a number this way has the same effect as adding it manually in Blocking Numbers — it’s simply a faster way to block a number you’ve already seen calling you.
Call Settings
Call Settings is where you’ll find most of the personal settings that control how your own line behaves — from simple switches like Do Not Disturb to more detailed features like call forwarding, blocking, privacy, speed dial, reminders and recordings. The rest of this chapter walks through each of these, one at a time.
General Call Behavior
The General tab under Call Settings holds two simple switches that change how your phone behaves during a call.
Music on Hold plays music to the other person whenever you put them on hold, instead of silence. Do Not Disturb — often shortened to DND — is a switch you can turn on when you don’t want your phone to ring at all; while it’s on, callers are treated as if you didn’t answer, and are handled according to the rules you set up in Call Forwarding.
Voicemail
Your Voicemail Settings
The Voicebox tab under Call Settings — "voicebox" is just another word for voicemail — is where you manage everything about the messages callers leave you when you can’t answer.
Here you can change the PIN you use to listen to your messages by phone, change the email address your voicemail notifications are sent to, and decide whether a recording of the message itself should be attached to that email — handy if you’d rather listen from your inbox than dial in. A related switch lets you delete a message automatically once it has been emailed to you, so your voicebox doesn’t fill up with messages you’ve already heard elsewhere. A language option controls which language the automated voicemail system speaks to your callers in.
Recording Your Greetings
Four separate greetings cover different situations: one for when you’re already on another call, one for when you don’t answer at all, a standard default greeting used otherwise, and a temporary one you can switch on for a short period — for example while you’re on vacation — without losing your normal greeting underneath it. Each greeting starts out using a generic default recording, until you upload your own.
Call Forwarding
Deciding Where Your Calls Go
Call forwarding lets you send incoming calls somewhere other than your own phone. The Forwarding tab under Call Settings groups your rules into four situations: Always, If not available, If busy, and On no answer — so you can, for example, always forward calls to your mobile while also setting up a different rule for when you simply don’t pick up in time.
Each rule can be switched on or off at any time without deleting it, so you can prepare a forwarding rule in advance — say, for when you’re on vacation — and simply flip it on when you need it.
Where a Call Can Be Forwarded To
When you create or edit a rule, Forward to offers a wide range of destinations: another phone number, your voicemail, a conference room, a recorded announcement, a fax-by-email address, and several more advanced options that this handbook covers in their own chapters, such as an automated menu (see Extension Features).
You’re not limited to a single destination per rule: a rule can ring one destination for a set number of seconds, and if nobody answers there, automatically move on to a second one — for instance, ringing your mobile number for a minute before falling back to a conference room or your voicemail.
Forwarding Only in Certain Situations
Beyond the four basic situations, a Condition can narrow a rule down even further — for instance, only forwarding calls that come from a specific list of numbers, only on a particular date, or only outside your usual working hours.
Conditions can also be combined — a single rule might apply only when the call comes from one of a chosen list of numbers and only on a specific date — which makes it possible to set up quite precise forwarding behavior without needing more than one rule.
Blocking Numbers
Blocking Incoming Calls
The Block Incoming tab lets you control who can reach you. You can switch on All anonymous incoming calls are blocked to reject any call that arrives without caller-ID information at all. Below that, a choice lets you pick the style of blocking that suits you: either block only the specific numbers you list, or — the opposite approach — allow only the numbers you list and block everyone else.
Whichever style you choose, Add Number is how you build up your list.
Blocking Outgoing Calls
The Block Outgoing tab works the same way, but for calls you make rather than calls you receive: you can block specific numbers, or restrict yourself to only being able to call the numbers on your list.
This page may also show Ncos options. Ncos stands for "Number Class of Service" — it’s simply a way your operator can group whole categories of destinations together, such as international numbers or premium-rate numbers, so that an entire category can be allowed or blocked at once instead of you having to list every number individually. If your operator hasn’t set this up for your account, you can simply ignore it and manage your outgoing block list one number at a time.
Hiding Your Caller ID
The Privacy tab lets you decide whether the person you’re calling can see your number. Turning on Hide your number to the callee makes your calls appear as "Anonymous" to people outside your phone system, much like the caller-ID blocking feature offered by many mobile carriers. A second, separate switch Hide number to the callee within own PBX lets you hide your number also from colleagues within your own company phone system.
Keep in mind that hiding your number doesn’t guarantee every phone system will honor the request — some emergency services and toll-free numbers are required by law to see the real caller ID regardless of this setting.
Speed Dial
Dialing Shortcuts
Speed dial lets you reach a number you call often by dialing a short code
from your phone instead of the full number. Each entry in the Speed Dial
list shows the code and the number it dials — for example, dialing *0
might ring your partner’s mobile number directly.
Adding a Shortcut
Select Add Speed Dial, then choose which code should trigger it and which number it should dial. Only a limited set of codes is available (from 0 to 9), since they have to stay short enough to be quick to dial and not clash with other features of your phone system.
Reminder Calls
Setting a Wake-Up or Reminder Call
The Reminder tab turns your phone into a simple alarm clock: at the time you choose, it rings you, just like a hotel wake-up call.
Once you switch the feature on, you can choose whether it should ring you only once, every weekday, or always (every day), and pick the time using a simple clock.
Call Recordings
Listening Back to Recorded Calls
If your operator has enabled call recording for your line, recordings appear under the Recordings tab, listed by date and time together with the caller and callee involved, so you can find and listen back to a specific call.
The Filter button lets you narrow the list down, which becomes useful once you have more recordings than fit comfortably on one page.
Registered Devices
What’s Currently Connected to Your Line
Registered Devices lists every phone, app or piece of software currently signed in and able to receive calls on your number. Each entry shows what kind of device or app it is, and how long its connection is valid for before it needs to reconnect on its own — this happens automatically in the background, so you don’t normally need to do anything about it.
If you see a device here that you don’t recognize, or one you’ve stopped using — an old phone, for instance — you can remove it from this list. This is also a useful first stop if calls to your number aren’t reaching you: checking that the device you expect to ring is actually listed here can quickly tell you whether the problem is with the phone system or with the device itself.
| If your account administers the company’s phone system, this page lists every device registered across the whole company, not just your own — including your colleagues'. |
Account Settings
Getting to Your Account Settings
Selecting your name in the top-right corner of any page opens a small menu with your phone numbers, Settings, and the option to sign out.
The Settings page shown from there holds two separate passwords, which is worth understanding clearly: your web password is what you type in on the sign-in page to reach this portal, while your SIP password is a separate, usually longer code that your physical phone or softphone app uses behind the scenes to register with the phone system and place calls. Changing one never affects the other.
| the SIP password is visible and can be modified only by a user that can administer the entire company’s phone system. |
Changing Your Password
Selecting Change Web Password opens a small form where you type your new password twice, with a strength indicator to help you judge whether it’s strong enough.
Change SIP Password works the same way, but only ever needs to be touched if your operator or installer asks you to — for instance, when setting up a new phone, since that password (together with the SIP URI shown on the same page) is what gets entered into the phone itself, not into a web browser.