Overview
Using SIP trunks, you can send inbound calls from other communication systems (such as your Cisco PBX or Genesys Contact Centre, etc.), into Spoke Phone, or send calls from Spoke Phone out to other communication systems.
This article will show you how to sync your external phone system and contact centre directories into Spoke Phone; making it easy for Spoke Phone users to connect with external users, devices, and groups on other communication systems.
It contains the following sections:
- Process overview
- Manually adding external users, devices, and hunt groups
- Assigning the new endpoint to a Spoke Phone user
- Automatically adding external users, devices, and hunt groups
Process overview
- Step #1. Create a SIP trunk.
- Step #2. Add external users, devices, and hunt groups to the SIP trunk (this step).
Manually adding external users, devices, and hunt groups to the Spoke Phone directory via the online Spoke Phone account portal
- Login to your Spoke Phone account portal.
- Go to phones and devices > add device.
- Display name: This should be a logical name such as a user (e.g. Jason Kerr), a common area phone device (e.g. Kitchen Phone), or a hunt group/call queue (e.g. Sales).
- SIP device registrar/trunk: Select the SIP trunk of your external phone system, contact center, or other communications services (note: this would never be Spoke Phone).
- Type in register/trunk: Select what type of endpoint this is: user, phone or device, or call queue.
- Extension number: This is the extension number of this device on the external system.
- ID in register/trunk (OPTIONAL): You can optionally enter the external endpoints UUID (a GUID), that uniquely identifies this endpoint in your external system. Adding this information here passes the UUID back to you in the developer API.
- Click save changes to save the new device.
Assigning the new endpoint to a Spoke Phone user
You can assign the new external endpoint to a Spoke Phone user so that calls to that external system's user, device, or call queue, will ring the Spoke Phone user on their Spoke Phone app.
- Find the new endpoint in the phones and devices table.
- Click the edit pencil at the far right.
- Select the Spoke Phone user from the dropdown: Assign this device to a user?
- Save changes.
Automatically adding external users, devices, and hunt groups to the Spoke Phone directory via the Spoke Phone API
For large deployments, it's best to use our Developer API to automatically add users, devices, and call queues from your legacy phone system into Spoke Phone.
If you plan on keeping your legacy phone system AND Spoke for the long term, you should consider building a robust and productized integration that regularly syncs your legacy phone system directory to Spoke Phone.
If you are migrating off your legacy systems to Spoke, you may get away with building an temporary application that you can use a few times as you migrate, then never use again.
Either way, you will be:
- Obtaining the users, queues, and device information from your legacy phone system
- Formatting/cleaning that data into a shape suitable for use in Spoke
- Writing a program or script to connect to Spoke Developer API and upload the information
For more information, visit our Developer API documentation.
Using a CSV template to help collect and format data, and how that data maps to the Spoke app's directory and contact card
The diagrams below show you where the various API data elements are used/show in the Spoke Apps.
Spoke has created these sample CSV file formats that you can use to collect and format user and call group data from your existing PBX. You can use these CSV files as the data source for your integration.