About Direct Inward Dialing

In traditional telecommunications, Direct Inward Dialing (DID, or DDI in Europe) is the ability of a person outside an organization to call an internal PBX extension without going through an operator or intermediate interface of any kind. In Vocera, DID is the ability of a caller anywhere to place a telephone call directly either to a user's badge or to a group, without going through the hunt group Genie or any speech recognition prompts.

Vocera supports DID if you are using Vocera SIP Telephony Gateway and SIP signaling protocol. This feature is powerful because it allows callers who are not aware of Vocera or its features to contact users directly on their badges. DID extends the benefits of Vocera to telephone callers who do not necessarily even belong to the organization that is deploying Vocera.

To enable DID, your PBX administrator must reserve a range of DID numbers for Vocera to use, and you must identify that range to Vocera. Use the DID Info page of the Telephony screen in the Administration Console to specify the range of DID numbers reserved for Vocera.

Tip: The DID numbers that you specify must be full 10-digit telephone numbers with area code in the US locale (or full numbers with city and region codes, in other locales).

If your PBX administrator provides a hunt group number as part of the DID range, enter it as the hunt number in Vocera, but do not include it in the range of DID numbers that you configure on the DID info page. User and group profiles may be assigned the DID numbers that you specify in the Administration Console, and you do not want a user or group to have the same extension as the hunt number.

If an incoming call arrives on a number that is within the specified DID range, but the number is not assigned, Vocera automatically directs the call to the hunt group Genie.

When multiple sites are sharing a PBX, they also share the single pool of DID numbers that are enabled in the primary site. You cannot distribute different ranges of DID numbers to individual sites that share a PBX.

When multiple sites are using different PBXs, each PBX may provide a different range of DID numbers, or even none at all. The way each PBX is configured determines whether its associated sites have access to DID.

Note: DID numbers may be more expensive and more difficult to obtain than other PBX extensions. You do not need to have a dedicated DID number for every badge to receive some of their benefits. See Configuring Dynamic Extensions.

See Configuring Direct Inward Dialing for complete information on setting up DID.