Design advice around hoteling and common areas

[Boyan]

Hi everyone,

I need your advice around hoteling and common areas with physical phones. My specific question is in context of Zoom licensing and features. The use case is this: work areas which are NOT assigned to a specific person and need physical phones. The first thing that comes to mind is "common area" phones; but I'm looking for a way to find a more efficient allocation of Zoom licensing. You see, some times the hoteling areas won't be used by a human for months and common area phones require a license whether someone is using the phone or not.

Is there a better way to solve this?

For example, and I'm only mentioning this to spark ideas, I'm not looking for such setup pre se -- in the Cisco UC world there was this thing called "extension mobility"  - basically one has a fleet of empty shell phones where a human logs-in (using the keypad) and then the phone becomes "theirs". Our standard user assigned license is Zoom One and yes one can assign multiple physical phones to a Zoom One user but there's no way to predict where they would sit.

So back to the hoteling, what would you suggest? 

[sachinzoom]

Hello Boyan,

Great use case. Hoteling or EM in cisco terms is referred to as Hotdesking in zoom phone. It is very simple to setup a phone for hotdesking: 

Read on:

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/11522004994957-Enabling-or-disabling-hot-desking-for-devic...

If this response helps, please accept the answer as an accepted solution, so others can benefit as well.

[Boyan]

@sachinzoom Thank you for the quick reply - glad to read up and learn about hot desking.

However that is not what I am looking for. The phone still needs to be assigned and provisioned. I am looking for NO license NO nothing, ** UNTIL ** someone signs-in. The hot desking basically does EM but with the most valuable Cisco feature missing - in EM you can have a phones with ZERO nothing entitlement; just sitting there with blank screen and IP address, no license, no nothing so you can have ten thousand of those for $0 cost and only permit users to sign-in

So is there another solution to my issue? Other than hot desking?

Thanks

[sachinzoom]

Hello  @Boyan 

Glad you have info about hotdesking. As far as licensing, Zoom desk phone does need licensing. I would recommend you to speak to your Zoom AE for Common Area licenses to discuss further.

However, I see you are not interested in Hotdesking. In that case, just like your use case, you can enter MACs as Unassigned. See screenshot below. When you actually provision them by asisgning to a user or a common area, Will you need a license.

[Boyan]

@sachinzoom Cool, that's what I was afraid of. No biggie - oh well, life. Thank you for clarifying that. 

What about assigning multiple phones to a user or license:

a) I understand only 1 phone can be assigned to a common area license, correct?

b) I can assign multiple phones to a fully licensed Zoom One user - but what is the maximum limit? Can I assign 10 phones to a Zoom One user? When does it stop, I know 3 works but what's the upper limit?

Thanks

Boyan

[sachinzoom · Accepted solution]

Hi @Boyan 

a) Yes

b) You are right, Maximum limit: 3. 

If this response helped, please accept the answer as an accepted solution, so others can benefit as well. 

[enielsen]

3 is the max number of desk phones to a user extension.

I think other limits are:

1. Can have one zoom app on a computer logged into a given user extension
2. Can also have 1 mobile and 1 tablet logged into a user extension via the zoom app
3. Can also have 1 Zoom Phone appliance logged into a user extension