Hot Desk

Overview

The hot desk feature allows for a temporary or communal workstation. For instance, in an office environment, multiple devices can be setup in a centralized location. These devices would then be solely utilized by visiting supervisors, traveling salespersons, and other users who do not have a permanent workstation. 

The devices do not belong to a single person; they belong to anchor extensions. The user activates one of the devices (via feature code or the Portal), which will then route that user's inbound calls to the device until deactivated. It will act as if the device is the user's personal one; that is, until the user is released from the device.

General Rules

• Activating a device will release the previous user if they forgot to release themselves.

• If it is the Call Center Agent's first time logging into the call queue, then the agent must log into the Portal first. After that has happened, then their queue status will change from "Offline"' to "Logged In" or "Logged Out", and hot-desking will work as expected.

• After the device is activated, the user's calls are automatically routed to the device and call statistics will be recorded as usual.

• The phone's physical display will always display the anchor device's extension in the account label section. However, the line appearances will change to the current owner's first name//last name//extension

• MWI will reflect the current owner of the anchor device's voicemail box status.

• Caller ID information will reflect the current owner of the anchor device extension based on the current owner's user profile configuration. In order for this to work, dial translations must be configured with correct tokens in the source name and user fields.

How to Assume Ownership or Release an Anchor Device Using Star Codes

• User 9876 picks up the hot desk device and dials the configured star code to activate the device ( *44 ).

• The device will prompt the user to "please enter your account number". The user dials 9876 (their extension).

• The device will then prompt the user to "please enter your password followed by the pound key". The user dials their password (their voicemail pin set in their Portal profile).

• The device will prompt for the user to confirm the device owner (for example, "press 2 to confirm user 9876 is the device owner").

• After confirming the prompt, the hot desk will activate.

  • The user can hang up.

  • The device will now accept inbound calls to that user, and outbound calls will show the user's caller ID.

• The device will continue to display the device's extension and not the hot-desking user's extension. This is expected behavior.

• Caller ID will display the user's extension (or DID) and not the device's.

• User 9876 is done for the day. They can leave and their hot desk session will be released when the next user activates the device, or (preferably) they can use the configured star code ( *45 ) to release the device. The device will prompt for the user's password and then will issue a "thank you" before disconnecting and releasing the user from the device. The hot desk device will return ownership to the anchor user.

How to configure

Create a Dedicated Hot Desk Device & Anchor User

Step 1 - Create the Anchor User

1. First create an anchor user. This should not be a real user, although they are created the same way. This user will own the hot desk device.

2. Navigate to the Portal > Users. You can either choose to import multiple new users at once using the "import" tool, or manually add one user at a time by using the "Add User" button.

3. Create the anchor user as you would any other user, with the following exceptions:

   1. NAME Create an easily identifiable name to differentiate this anchor user from real users.

      Example: First Name Hot Desk  Last Name Anchor User

   2. EXTENSION In order to ensure that there are no unexpected conflicts in the future, use range 94000 - 94999 for hot desk devices.

   3. SCOPE An anchor users should have a Call Center scope. This allows them to have extra functionality, as opposed to a Basic User scope.

   4. ENABLE  VOICEMAIL The option to "enable voicemail" is checked by default.  Leave this checked.

   5. ADD PHONE EXTENSION

      This is important! Make sure "add phone extension" remains checked.

      This will also create the user device, which is not a phone configuration. It is a SIPendpoint that the phone config uses to register the phone against.

Step 2: Add the Hot Desk Device (Phone Hardware)

1. The next step is to add the MAC address(es) for the dedicated hot desk devices. Since the anchor users have already been created. Remember the schema (94000 - 94999) when assigning devices to extensions.

2. Navigate to the Portal > Inventory > Phone Hardware. Add the device, making sure to use the correct MAC address, and assign Line 1 to the anchor user's extension.

Apply Tokens to Phone Wizard Template (Recommended)

Dynamic and static tokens can be applied on a per-brand or per-device basis. This is not required, but it is highly recommended. It ensures that the hot desk device displays the logged-in user's name and extension as Line 1.

1. In the Portal, navigate to Inventory > Phone Hardware > Phone Wizard dropdown arrow > Manage Configuration Templates.

2. Select the appropriate template. For instance, if all of the Yealink SIP-T54S device's are being used for hot-desking, select that template.

Note that the "Line Appearance" for Line 1 is already set as a dynamic line. This is important and means Line 1 will change depending on set variables.

3. Now choose tokens that should populate as Line 1. Any combination of static text (it will never change) and dynamic tokens (changes based on who logs into the phone) work here. Type it in the "Custom Label (Optional)" field underneath Line 1.

   • Here is an example that uses only tokens (which are inherently dynamic): [[first_name]] [[last_name]] [[extension]] with spaces in-between, resulting in: Bob Smith 4545 appearing on Line 1

   • Here is an example that uses a combination of static text & dynamic tokens: hot desk [[first_name]] [[last_name]] [[extension]], resulting in: hot desk Bob Smith 4545 appearing on Line 1

4. Save changes to the template.

5. Navigate to Inventory > Phone Hardware.

   • Check the box, or multiple boxes, for the devices that are used for hot-desking and require the template you just created.

   • Then click on the Phone Wizard dropdown arrow > "Apply a template to selected devices".

The configuration template modal will list the available templates. Select the right one and then click either "apply" (and resync later) or choose to "apply and resync" now. Resyncing will reboot the devices.

Make sure the devices you are selecting match the model you chose to configure a template for.