SARK V4.0.0 Vintage

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Introduction

SARK has traditional "bounce" and "campon" support which used to be common in non-IP based PBX. Bounce and campon are primarily intended for use in those sites which do not wish to run wall-to-wall voicemail.

Bounce

Bounce will return a call to the transferer if the transferee is busy (engaged) or does not answer and does not have voicemail activated. This is useful in "must answer" environments where the user wants to ensure that calls are always answered by a person rather than voicemail. Bounce calls can be given their own ringtones or cadences for those SIP phones which support distinctive ring signalling passed in the SIP header. In this way the transferrer can readily distinguish between new calls and bounce calls. Bounce is very useful in busy environments where a receptionist/operator does not have time to use attended call transfer. With bounce, a "transfer and forget" approach can be used, safe in the knowledge that a non-answered call will be returned to the operator after it times out. Bounce is automatically applied to any extension on the system for which voicemail is not activated.

Campon

After a bounce return the transferrer may elect to transfer the call again to the transferee, perhaps for a more protracted period. Campon effectively "queues" the call to the transferee's extension. Multiple calls may be camped (queued) to the same extension at any one time. If the transferee clears while a call is camped to it, then after a short delay (up to 5 seconds) the first camped call will ring the transferee's extension. A time limit can be set on the camp after which the call will be returned to the original transferer in the same way as a bounce. To campon an extension simply transfer the incoming call to **extn. For example to camp an incoming call on extension 4105 then simply transfer it to **4105.

Bounce, Camp and call-waiting/multiple presence

Most SIP phones have the ability to handle multiple calls (presences) simultaneously, usually using multiple Busy Lamp "line" buttons or a "swap" button of some description. You can use bounce and camp whether the phone is set-up for multiple presence or not. Let's first look at a phone with call-waiting (multiple presence) turned off.

• With call-waiting turned off, the phone will give back a BUSY signal if you attempt to place a call to it when it is already in-call. If you blind-transfer a call to a phone in this state, SARK will wait 2 seconds, announce to the caller "Please hold while we try to connect you" and then bounce the call back to the transferer (this gives about a 5 second delay before the bounce occurs. The delay is deliberately introduced for BUSY extensions because bouncing more quickly than this can be confusing to the transferer). If on the other hand the target extension rings but is not answered, then after timeout seconds, the call will be automatically bounced back to the transferer.
  
• With call-waiting turned on, the phone will not give back a BUSY signal until all of its presences are engaged. If you blind transfer to a phone which has not yet used all of its presences then the transferee will be given some audible or visual signal (usually a flashing BLF lamp) to indicate a call waiting. If the transferee simply ignores the new call, then after timeout seconds, it will be bounced back to the transferer. Also, most SIP phones (e.g. Snom, Aastra et al) have a "cancel" or "decline" facility which the transferee can hit if she does not wish to take the new call. Exercising this option will cause the call to be immediately bounced back to the transferer.
  

In the same way that you can blind-transfer a call to a multi-presence phone, you can also blind-transfer with camp-on. The only real difference is that camped (queued) calls will wait longer at the phone before bouncing and multiple queued calls will only use a single phone presence so it is possible to have more calls queued than there are presences on the phone. However, in either case, if the phone supports multi-presence, and the feature is turned on, then the transferee will usually have some visual or audible indication of the new call's arrival. This will not be the case with phones which do not support multi-presence.

Bounce & Camp to "forwarded" phones

Bounce will "follow" forward chains in the normal way. If a phone is immediately forwarded then the extension to which it is forwarded will become the transfer target. If the phone is forwarded on busy or no answer then, again, the chain will be followed before the bounce back to the transferer is executed.
Camp will ONLY follow forward chains if they are set in the phone (and NOT in the PBX). The difference is subtle but important. Setting a CFWD on the phone using the phone's CFWD processing will cause the camp to be forwarded in the normal way (which may not be what you require). Setting a forward in the PBX (using the *2X* feature codes) will be ignored by camp.