Exclusive Hold

"Exclusive Hold"....  sounds esoteric doesn't it?    OK, so what is it?

Exclusive Hold is just a way to put a call on hold so that it can only be retrieved from the phone where you used the Exclusive Hold feature.

How do you use it?

Press Feature then Hold

If you want to put a call on Exclusive Hold, press the feature key and then the Hold key.  The screen will then display "Exclusive Hold".

Why would I want to use this feature?

In very busy environments, people can get mixed up about which call is holding on which line.  Using Exclusive Hold ensures that no one else can accidentally pickup your holding caller.

Norstar owners - the Clock is Ticking!

During the preceding two decades, Nortel (aka: Northern Telecom during the early 90′s) made some of the best business phone systems in the world. Many of you readers may still own Nortel phone systems. For those of you who don’t know, in 2009 Nortel fell into financial trouble because of some mis-managment at the top (similar to Enron or Worldcom). They were forced to sell their three major business units.

Nortel’s phone system unit was sold to Avaya. Avaya has discontinued support for many of the Nortel products – especially the popular NORSTAR series phone systems.

The popular refrain I hear from Norstar owners is “hey, it works great, why fix it if ain’t broke?”. Yes, I would agree. However, keep in mind that as these Norstar systems continue to age a few things become more worrisome.

1. The memory that holds the programming data (set numbers, ringing configurations, etc) is vulnerable to loss because the small battery inside the system wears out and no longer can hold the memory during a brief power outages.

2. Qualified technicians become more rare. Since most techs are out in the field installing the latest new equipment, they’re not seeing many Norstars anymore. And, old-timers, more familiar with Norstar, have since moved-on or been promoted to managers.

3. Parts become harder to find. This is a bit of a paradox as any quick search on eBay would seem to contradict what I just stated. As far as finding phone sets and pbx modules – it’s true, the used market is abound with them right now. However, specialty items such as particular software, voice mail hard/flash drives are not in as ready abundance.

What’s the best way to deal with this? The quick, easy, and most affordable way is to get a backup done and be sure your system is surge and lightning protected. Most *Good* techs who have the right equipment can perform a backup in less than 2 hours. Once you have a backup, it can be restored in about an hour. This is a better alternative that having to have the system re-programmed from scratch (which could take the better part of a day!)
Surge and Lightning protection should be less than $200 USD plus about an hour of install time.

Another approach, is creating what is known as a “Crash Kit”. This a collection of parts you would purchases (used) and keep on-hand in the event of a system failure. For most medium-sized Nortels (20-50 users), a Crash kit would probably be less than $1000 USD.

Finally, the ultimate and eventual path is to plan the upgrade to a new Business Phone system. The best time to do that planning is while the system you own is still running well.

Norstar as a sound monitor

I just recently had a major change in my lifestyle that caused me to investigate how to use my Norstar phone system as a Baby Monitor. This same idea could be applied many ways - not just for listening to sleeping babies.

The idea is very, very simple. You can do this one of two ways:

OPTION #1. simply go to the phone in the space you want to monitor (in my case, the baby's room) and make a hands-free intercom call to the phone where you want to listen from (i.e. the kitchen, garage, front office). It will help if there is someone waiting at that phone to answer it. Then just put the that second phone on hands free also. And there you have it, a direct speaker phone/speaker phone connection. Also, as not to send sound back to the babies room, I mute my HF key.


OPTION #2. This actually my prefered method. I go to the baby's room and press the key for PAGE. Depending on how your phone system is configured you may need to adjust 3 things:
- there will be a page time-out setting in the system programming. You'll want this as long as possible. Ususally 45 mins is max. (on some older systems, it may be indefinite).
- the page button should be programmed to page over "speaker and sets". (Feature * 630)
- The sets that you wish to send page to must all be in at least some page zone and have paging enabled.

The reason I like option#2 is it allows me to traverse the house from room to room (or basement) and I can monitor the babies room phone from any phone I happen to be near.

Now, if you want to get really fancy, you could put only specific phones into a particular page group (let's say page group 3). And then you could target the page broadcast to F*633 (the feature command for paging over speaker & sets on page group 3). This would allow you to exclude phones that didn't need to hear the paging such as another child's room, the living room or other.

Now I know I used the "baby monitoring" example. And, that's because it's something I need right now. But, just think for a minute of the ways this idea could be applied to other situations.

- a front office where the person staffing the front reception area has to go to the back part of the building. If that person were to press the page key on that phone in the front area, he could walk to other parts of the office and still hear the door, door chime, bells, whatever.

In any case, I hope that helps someone.

Assign speed dial number to button on Norstar phone

If you a have a Norstar phone system and you have a phone with some extra buttons on there doing nothing, you've probably wondered if you could assign a speed dial number to one. The answere is YES.

Now, in proper Nortel terms assigning a number to a button is called AUTODIAL. And, Autodial comes in two varieties - External Autodial and Internal Autodial. For this discussion, we'll focus on External Autodial.

First, what buttons can be programmed? Well, if you have a 7310 (not sure? try looking on the bottom side of the phone), you should have at the top of the phone a set of 4 x 3 buttons about 1/2" x 1" big. All those buttons can be assigned as AutoDial buttons. If you don't have a 7310, then your choices are limited. See the video for more on this.

Anyway, the way the assigning of a number is done is by pressing FEATURE * 1. Then press the button to be assigned. Then dial the digits and press OK (you'll see the word OK) in the LCD screen.

Here' s the video that shows you step-by-step: