The Hotline feature is available on the UC 202 set,but not on other sets at this time. But to "simulate" this try this..

1. Put the trunk being used in a dialing pattern that is used by that trunk only. For example, if you normally dial "9" to go out on a standard call, put this trunk in a dial "8" Outbound Route.
2. Program an external auto dial button on the phone with "8 <plus the number>.

When the user presses the button, the call will go out as programmed. That's an easy workaround to the situation.

Hope this helps!

www.ucidirect.com
Stocking Distributor for E-Metrotel

If you have UCx 4.5, the Hotline feature is available on all Nortel phones.

Go to the extension's configuration page, click on the Nortel Properties link to display the Edit Nortel Device page, go down to the Dialing Options section and enter the desired number in the Hotline field.

My bad....I was "assuming" your system was 4.0. My suggestion above was for a 4.0 system. As ucxguy stated, the option is in 4.5

www.ucidirect.com
Stocking Distributor for E-Metrotel

Not sure Hotline is what you want because you said you want the call to be made with pressing a button. If you use Hotline then all calls from that phone will go to that number. You may have to use 2 buttons to accomplish this.
Button 1 as a Shared Call Appearance for inbound call.
Button 2 as an Auto Dial for outbound call.

Unless you can put an actual line button on the phone because it sounds like Telco is actually sending the call depending on which side goes off hook.

Here is a little more information about what I am trying to accomplish. My ultimate goal is to PLAR (Private Line Automatic Ringdown) which operates between four extensions on my PBX and a single line phone at a remote location on the telephone company's network. The 4 extensions on my PBX are not dedicated for this "hotline", but I want these extensions to be able to access it by pressing a button on the phone. Essentially I need my ucx50 to simulate a single line phone going off hook from 4 locations.

The ring-down circuit is an analog line which I have coming into the e-metrotel box via port one on the internal FXO card. I have this configured as a DAHDi trunk. My first step is that I need to get all calls on this trunk to ring group 205. This incoming line gets no caller id information. How do I assign a DID to this DAHDi trunk, or is there a better way to route all calls arriving on this circuit to a specific ring group? I cannot simply configure a default route of no caller id as i do not want a regular incoming call with no caller id to be identified as a hotline call. I ran across a post talking about a FreePBX module, "DAHDI Channel DIDs" or "ZAP Channel DIDs", which allowed the user to assign a DID to an incoming DAHDI circuit. How do I do this on the emetrotel box?

The second step will be to create a button on each phone which will somehow cause the circuit to go offhook. I'm guessing that the best way to do this would be to create a button that dials a certain sequence which matches an outbound route for this trunk and then strip off the digits dialed.

Thanks for any suggestions on how to make this work....

The DID for the analog trunk is simple. Go to PBX - PBX Configuration - PSTN Trunk DIDs page, enter the channel number of the trunk and the DID you want to use (you could use anything from a single digit channel number to the 10 digit public number). Then set up your inbound route for the DID you configured to use the ring group 205 as the destination.