I encountered a tricky issue with having my simultaneous ring set to go to my cell phone. Like many people, I have a personal cell phone account (in my case with Verizon) that has its own voice mailbox, while I use my Exchange UM voice mail for missed calls at work.

I had set my MOC client for simultaneous ring to my cell phone since Unify Square had cutover onto OCS 2007 R2 a month ago. I had my Verizon account provisioned so that personal calls from people dialing my cell phone number directly (rather than my UC number) would go to my Verizon voice mailbox.  People calling my Unify Square UC number would still go to Exchange UM on a busy/no answer.

Things had been working great, but then one morning, whenever someone called me on my office number (425-865-0709) the call immediately went to my Verizon voice mail.

The problem was caused by my cell phone being turned off. This made Verizon forward the call immediately to voice mail, and that caused OCS to stop ringing my MOC/CPE endpoints. After calling Verizon Support, they told me that there was no provisioning option to make calls to my cell phone do some fixed number of phantom rings when the phone was off or out of service before transferring the call to voice mail. Voice mail is either enable or disabled, and if enabled will pick up immediately if the phone is out of service.

To work around this problem, I set my cell phone account to use Verizon's “No Answer/Busy Transfer” option (see http://support.vzw.com/features/calling_features/no_answer_transfer.html) and tell it to forward calls to my work number (which thereby causes the phone to bypass Verizon’s voice mail.) On a no answer, after 6 ring-back tones Verizon forwards the call to my Unify Square phone number, and then after the MOC time-out timer expires Exchange UM picks up. When the phone is off or out of service, it rings to the forwarded number immediately.

However, this is still not a great solution for several reasons:

·         I had to play with my MOC voice mail time out settings and reduce it from the 15 sec default to 13 sec. Verizon’s “No Answer/Busy Transfer” feature gives up on the forwarded call if it hasn’t been picked up by about 14 secs.

·         When the phone is turned off or out-of-service, the call forwarding behavior changes. To OCS, it looks like multiple calls are coming in, and multiple OCS toasts pop up (1 per ring) until it times out and Exchange UM gets the call. I haven’t done any trace analysis to see why this happens, but the user experience is pretty ugly!

·         You need to use your corporate voice mail system to handle personal calls to your cell phone, which won’t be acceptable for most users.

If any one knows a better solution, please let me know.