Follow me service, or find me serivce, is a very useful feature to locate a user. It allows an extension to ring multiple extensions or outside telephone numbers - anywhere in the world. This feature allows users to be reached at numberous devices, such as mobile, home-telephone, office-telephone, or softphones.
1.1 Demo scenario
Above figure describes a simple "find me" scenario. Holly is a sales manager and she often contacts with customers by using SIP softphone. She also hopes the customers can reach her through a PSTN telephone, or her mobile when the customers call her office telephone number. By the way, the PSTN telephone and the mobile are always not connected to miniSIPServer directly. It needs to connect VOIP carriers or gateways to miniSIPServer.
1.2 Strategies
Holly has configured several destinations in her follow-me service. She likes all these devices ringing at the same time when there is an incoming call to her office telephone since she is often out for business, then she can answer the call by using any devices she like, such as telephone,or mobile, or softphone. But for other peoples, for example, for G.T, he likes the incoming call to ring the devices one by one since he is always in the office.
That means there are different strategies for different peoples.
In normal, three kinds of strategies are often selected by peoples:
| Item | Description |
|---|---|
 |
Call all devices at the same time. |
 |
Call next one if current called party( or device) doesn't answer the call. |
 |
Call next destination, or device, in some intervals with current call. |
In version 2.8 or above version, miniSIPServer can support "follow me" service and three strategies described above, and each extension can be configured separately. Each extension can configure three destionations (phone numbers).
These destionations can be other extensions or outside numbers. If the number is outside number, it is required to add prefix "9" before the real number. "9" is the default prefix for out-group call.For an instance, if the outside number is "123456", we need configure the destination number to be "9123456". It is the "dial plan" feature described in the manual document.
It is very easy to deploy "follow me" feature with miniSIPServer. When add or edit a local user, please click "Follow Me service" tab. In this tab, we just only need to configure "strategy" and the destinations. Following figure describes this configuration.
Please refer to manual document for more details about these items.