Need some ideas/feedback on an update to our company's phone extensions
Our company is looking at moving forward with a new method of assigning phone extensions. Our current method is kind of all over the place with assigning extensions as previously each of our buildings had some form of 1/2 digits prefix and then 2 numbers following to assign to a user. Now they are looking at a 5-digit extension, where the first 2 digits apply to the building, the next 2 apply to the room number, and the last digit applies to the desk.
This mainly came about because we have a ton of people that move throughout the year and just take their phones with them. This causes confusing as to where they are, paging gets messed up, safety concerns as if they have to call 911, they may be routed to the wrong location.
One thing we are trying to implement is that the phones do not leave the desk/office they are in. I am having trouble figuring this out overall and several of us have different ideas on how we should proceed. We would constantly need to be aware of where people are and in a company of 300+ employees, that can be hard to track. We have thought of having to go in and change each employees assigned extension but that could get tedious with multiple changes. We've thought about making them workstations and then the phones just wouldn't have their names assigned. Another thing I have looked into slightly is Hot Desking, but I am still pretty unfamiliar with it.
I am hoping someone has experienced this before or has a better idea for us before we go ahead with something and it is a bigger pain than we thought of.
Some things that may help:
- We use Cisco Webex through the Webex Control Hub
- We have over 20 locations
Please feel free to ask me any kind of clarifying questions.