If I understand your question correctly, it sounds like you're reusing your Poly phones from your current provider and will be configuring them to RC?

The one thing you'll (likely) have to do regardless will be to delete the associations of the MAC from your current provider, factory reset and then manually add to Ringcentral via their provisioning steps. Once the devices are removed from your current service, they will no longer ring with that service, so keep that in mind. You could register the devices to have separate accounts, one for each service, but that's not worth the effort.

What you can decide prior to the 30th is when you want to start using them. If you wait until the 30th, the numbers will port and you can start to redo the phones. To make your life easier, though, I'd look at call forwarding your DIDs from the current provider to Ringcentral so you can start to pluck away at it prior to the 30th. Depending on your call flow, I'd leave your primary call taker(s) ie: reception, on the current service until the port day. There are some limits with providers on how many concurrent calls a DID can support while being call forwarded, so you wouldn't want to risk your main number dropping calls.

tak-it1,

Thanks for your reply, I appreciate it! I will start by just simply stating that I am not exactly sure what DID means.

To more accurately describe our situation, I will lay out our system better. So the Polycoms we currently use for our deskphones are, as far as I am aware, all tied to the same company number. For instance, a call to our main number will ring on all our deskphones simultaneously. With my lack of experience working with VoIP systems, I had (probably naively) assumed that this meant all our Polycoms were tied to the same "number or line" and then only distinguished through our extensions. The number transfer process, which I was guided through by the implementation team, is currently only transferring our main company number.

However, as I have begun to build out the phone system in the RC Admin Console, I see that it is also possible that our call flows have just been arranged with our current provider to have all our devices ring at once. Do either of these setups seem more or less likely? I will have to do more research into how our current system is configured. In any case, all our Polycoms have will likely need to have their MAC addresses removed from our current provider, as you mentioned. Does this mean though that I should just wait for the main number to be transferred/ported before provisioning our Polycoms into RC?

I apologize if this is rambling, I am trying to figure this out as I go and some of the RC agents have confused me further.

Sincerely,

Nick Newman

DID (Direct Inward Dialing) Number or a Virtual Number (also called a DDI in Europe) is a local telephone number in a selected country or city.

Hey Nick,

Yeah, DID simply = phone number. If you're just transferring your main #, then perhaps you only had one. You'll have a unique number (for the most part) for each extension on RC with some extensions. These will be the user DIDs and numbers.

Anyway, it sounds like your current provider just had a ring group that rang all of your phones. You can obviously keep that the same with RC or start to make adjustments and use menus, groups, etc.

In regards to the Polycom transition, then yes, it likely would be easiest just to wait until the transfer date before programming the phones rather than doing the call forward scenario I suggested earlier. Once the numbers port, I'd just have your users logged into the mobile app so the business can still take calls, and then start programming the phones for the users and they can resume using those devices as per usual.

Hey all,

I now have a better understanding of our system, so my questions have been answered. Thanks to all those that reached out and tried helping me think through this.

It turns out that each of our Polycoms does have its own number associated with it, and that incoming calls are handled to ring all our devices simultaneously. This is something I have looked into setting up in a similar manner for our RC system, so I think everything should work out!

Something to be aware about - for the polys - if you have any special Multicast settings, SIP line bits, etc. You may have to log into the Poly GUI and make the changes, and then take out the provisioning HTTPS server line.

We've gone many rounds with RC techs about reprovisions happening overnight, and we'd come in and our Multicast and SIP settings all set back to default. Even though the RC techs state over and over that their not touching any other settings - I've shown them hard data to refute that.

Other items that get changed back - names, extension labels, SIP digitmap timing...

Also, something they don't document well - when placing a call through the app, on the very small print of 'Call from' - that will show the RC Direct number assigned to the extension by default.

If you have one main number (like us) that you want your Caller ID to go out as, this is listed as 'Alternate Caller ID ' in the Users/Outgoing/Caller ID area. This was a headache for us when we first started. A Template with just that item will save many mouse clicks!

Good luck - and sorry I didn't see the message earlier in the month.