A series of shortfalls: Paging, Call Queues, Ring Tones, Greeting

[JHS_Durham]

We are new to Zoom Phone as of this week. We had been with Ring Central a few years prior. 

I am very surprised to find that Zoom is missing the most basic of things for the phone functions. 

• Paging - we have Polycom VVX 350 desk phones. The Keys & Buttons setting does not work for "Paging - Line". When applied to the user, it never appears as an option on their phone soft keys. Broken. 
• Paging - You can get around this at least, by picking up the hand set and entering the Extension number assigned to a Paging group. But when you do, it still does not work right at all. Instead of hearing a Page across all the phone speakers, it makes the phones RING. If a person does not pick up the phone, they miss the page. For us, this is a major safety issue. We use phone paging for critical announcements, and calls to other staff for assistance if a client is in crisis at the desk
• Call Queues - I had written about an issue with this, and then suddenly an hour after I posted this, all the Queues started to work correctly to show all calls and what status calls were - very odd. 
• Ring Tones - while you can pick a ring tone in your app, you have no way to ever play it / test it. You have no idea what your ring tone is until it actually has a call come through. 
• Greeting - You cannot change your greeting in the app. You have to go into the website portal, log in there, click on phone, then click your settings, then scroll way down, then go to Add Audio to finally get to a spot where you can record a new greeting. That is extremely convoluted and cumbersome when people tend to change their Greeting a couple of times a day to inform callers of their availability. In other cloud phone services I have worked with, you can record a greeting right out of the desktop app with 2 clicks! 

I cannot find anywhere in the Zoom community system, any kind of list of Features being worked on, or a voting system for features. I have found a number of posts about these issues above, but they all died for further replies many months (in some cases years) ago. So these are not new queries on my part - people have been asking about this stuff for a few years already. But there seems to be no updates or follow up by zoom on these things? 

aIs there some secret place I have not found yet? 

[JHS_Durham]

And to clarify - for example, Paging worked perfectly under other providers. We configured the button from the admin website, configured the groups, and when the staff pressed the Soft Key to page, the voice was heard automatically over all the phone speakers. So this is not a device issue - this indeed a Zoom issue. 

[JohnGage]

My company is also new to Zoom and compared to our legacy Cisco Call Manager we're feeling similar pain.  One thing I can almost help with are the voicemail greetings.  I agree that the website process for updating a greeting in unnecessarily cumbersome.  An alternative is to dial *86 from the Zoom client.  The user is able to enter their PIN and record a new greeting.  My challenge with this solution is there isn't a way to create a speed dial or similar, users have to remember *86.  Creating a personal contact doesn't work since *86 is an invalid phone number format.

If you have desk phones you may want to look into which features are fully supported.  I learned today that prohibiting users from forwarding their extension to an external number can only be enforced in the Zoom client.  Desk phones can auto forward their extension off the network and avoid call recording.

[ZoomQuestions4]

Regarding Paging - We are new to Zoom in the last two weeks. Our paging did not work until we applied a specific Provisioning Template to the vvx250, vvx350, and vvx450 phones. I was given this code by a Zoom support person that we worked with during our rollout.
Also I should mention that it was immediate on some phones and others it took a while to percolate down to them. Like a couple of hours. We also had to REBOOT, not just resync, after applying the provisioning.

This is the code, and I provide it with no guarantees because I cannot guarantee that it will work for you. It provided a Paging button under "More" on each phone.

ptt.pageMode.codec="G.711Mu"
ptt.pageMode.enable="1"
ptt.pageMode.group.1.available="1"
ptt.compatibilityMode="1"
ptt.pageMode.group.1.allowTransmit="1"
ptt.pageMode.group.1.allowReceive="1"
ptt.pageMode.group.1.label="Page All"
ptt.pageMode.group.1.subscribed="1"
ptt.address="224.0.1.117"
ptt.port="5000"

These are the instructions I followed to apply this code. (We also added some code to be able to dial 10-digit numbers without pressing Send/Dial) - you will see those two lines at the top of my provisioning code in the instructions below.

SINGLE PHONE PROVISION & CREATE PROVISION TEMPLATE

Phone System Management

Company Info

Account Settings

Desk Phone section

Provision Template - Manage

Add

Save

Phones and Devices

Find the phone and click on it

Like I said above - REBOOT instead of Resync.
Try it with one (or two phones so you can test a page). It will work on up to 50 phones.

[jcfenton]

Is this just to add the page button or does this also enable the page group to be paged and the page go out over their speakers without answering?  Sorry if that is confusing.

[ZoomQuestions4]

It allows you to page and the sound goes out through the speaker. They don't have to answer. We had that problem before we sent this provisioning down to the phones so I know what you are talking about.

[jcfenton]

Excellent, thank you!