Configuring Telephony PINs

A telephony PIN (Personal Identification Number) allows an organization to authorize telephone usage and to distribute telephone costs among different users, departments, or sites. Some organizations use the term FAC (Forced Authorization Code or Forced Access Code) to describe this feature.

For example, a company might require employees to enter a PIN along with a phone number to make a long distance or toll call. Vocera's telephony PIN feature automatically adds a PIN to the dialing sequence when a user places a call that requires one. In addition to long distance and toll calls, a PIN is also used for long distance forwarding, transferring, and paging.

Note: A user cannot make toll calls—and telephony PINs have no effect—unless he or she belongs to a group that allows toll calls.

Use the PIN page of the Telephony screen in the Administration Console to configure PINs.

Telephony PINs can be assigned at one or more of the following levels, listed in descending order of precedence:

  1. User profile. If a user's profile specifies a telephony PIN, it is used each time the user places a call that requires a PIN.

  2. Department group. If a telephony PIN is not specified in the user's profile, but the user belongs to department group to which a PIN has been assigned, then that PIN is used.

    When a user belongs to more than one department that has a telephony PIN assigned, a PIN is chosen at random from among those departments. Thus, costs are shared evenly among the user's various departments. To override this behavior, specify a PIN in the user's profile; for example, you could enter the PIN of the department to which the user's long-distance calls are billed.

  3. Site. If a telephony PIN is not specified in the user's profile and the user does not belong to a department group that has a PIN, then the PIN specified for the user's site is used.

If there is no user PIN, no department PIN, and no site PIN, then no telephony PIN is used.