A guide on how to create and use sites and departments.
Sites and departments are a way of separating out certain users and features into groups so that they can be more easily organised.
By the nature of their wording, a "site" is designed to represent a physical location such as a head office and a remote office, whereas a department is meant to represent a group of people who do a singular function such as "sales" or "engineering".
However, whilst this is their design, there is no reason why you can't use them for anything else you want as long as the setup benefits the end goal, for example we've seen end users have multiple companies working at the same physical location so wanted them all under the same domain, but separated them via site so it was easier to configure their phones and users.
The features available to you if you do use a setup like this are as follows:
- Set the Caller ID of an entire Site
- Set Music on Hold for a an entire Site
- Call pick up from a site or a department
- Filter contact directory by site or department
- Set Dial Permissions per site
- Setup configuration file overrides per site
- Filter CDR reports via site
Departments
Departments have much less functionality than sites and are mainly used for the contact directory filtering and call pickup
There is no location within the platform to configure a department itself, instead it's configured on a User's profile page, or when adding a new user.
When configuring the "Department" field on a user, it will show a list of all available departments, however, you do not have to select a pre existing department.
To create a new department, simply type in the name of the department you wish to add
You will know it worked because a green "new" tag will appear next to the filed.
Save the user and the new department will now be available to assign to other users.
WARNING: If you're configuring multiple users at once in different tabs, creating a new department on one of the tabs will require you to refresh the page on the other tabs. If you don't do this it will attempt to create a new department with the same name for every user you are configuring which will break the configuration.
Sites
New sites can be added in the same way as departments, as in, when editing or creating a user, you can type in the name of a site you want to add in the "Site" field and it will create a new site with that name when saving the user.
However, sites have more functionality and can be edited further, navigate to the "Sites" tab which is under the "Users" tab in the domain view.
1 - List Of Sites: Here you can see a list of all existing sites as well as some information about the site, clicking the name of the site will bring you to the site configuration page for that site.
2 - Site Users: This is the number of users assigned to this site, click the number to list said users in the users tab.
3 - Registered Phones: This is a list of all registered phones under this site.
4 - Music On Hold: This lets you configure the music on hold that plays for all users in this site (see How do I configure music on hold?).
5- Add Site: This lets you add and configure a new site.
Click the "Add Site" button to open the new site configuration panel..
1 - Site Name: Set a name for this site
2 - Language: Set the language of users in this site.
3 - Time Zone: Set the time zone of users in this site. For UK time that also takes daylight savings into account, set this to "Europe/London".
4 - Area Code: Set the area code of users in this site.
5 - Caller ID/Emergency Caller ID: Set the Caller ID and Emergency Caller ID of users in this site.
6 - Dial Translation: Set the dial translation of users in this site. This is a rather niche feature that is rarely used, for normal functionality, set the Dial Translation to be that which is the same name of the domain you are on, therefore if you are on the domain "TestingDomain" pick the dial translation called "TestingDomain".
7 - Dial Permission: Set the dial permission of users in this site.
8 - Device Defaults: Configure any configuration file overrides you'd like to set (see How do I modify the configuration file that gets sent to my devices when auto provisioning?).
IMPORTANT: Setting the user defaults here won't automatically pull the changes through to the user, to do that you need to go into a user's profile and set "Overwrite with Site Defaults" to yes.
