If you are saying that you want specific phones to select specific trunks when they dial out, then you will have to use Outbound route and Custom Contexts to do it.

I have a customer who is on a hosted system with multiple locations that need to do that with sip trunks and I finally figured out how to make it work. The programming in the same no matter what kind of trunks you are using.

If you've never used the custom contexts, then your in for a real treat!

You can't just press one of the SCA keys, get dial tone, then dial out like you do on the Norstar/BCM. You have to route the calls out similar to how you do it with a PRI on them.

You will have to group the trunks you want for each Dr's office, then use the custom context to allow or deny access to those routes. If you have one receptionist doing the calling for multiple doctors, that's a different story. In that case, you just may have to use different access codes for them.

Telcodog thank you so incredibly much for shedding some light on this. I am still new this year to IP telephony I worked many years ago with Nortel MICS and CICS. I have been working with EMT support but was concerned I was asking the wrong questions or asking incorrectly so thank you very much for adding another take on how to tackle this! I now think I have one other solution to this that at least fits my situation (6 analog lines in).

(1)I will assign SCA keys that will light up for each of six lines down left side buttons top and bottom for both inbound and outbound routes to show when a specific line is in use.

(2)I will configure dialing prefixes to allow someone to pick a line if necessary or to allow the system to select another line to forward the call out on. example: 9 before dial to pick line 1. 8 before dial to pick line 2.

I need to preface this next portion with some info about my particular case to make my decisions more understandable.

This practice is shared by 2-3 doctors. They have what is described as a concierge service which means people pay a large lump some with the idea that they can reach not just a person after hours but their actual doctor. This has been achieved in the past by them selecting the first line of their hunt group and dialing *72 to have the provider forward the lines direct to their cell phone. Now they are at a point where they realize statistically the majority of after hours calls are along the lines of "hey hate to bug ya this is not an emergency I actually just wanted to schedule an appointment and if I didn't call now I wont remember later". That being said they have opened up to the idea of an IVR that has an extremely quick message directing to press 1 to schedule or 2 or just hold for the doctor followed by an immediate drop to the doctors phone if nothings pressed.

(3) So I am simply going shift the call forwarding from the provider to the PBX. I will build them an IVR first and if that becomes unsatisfactory or undesirable at any point I will move to having the calls simply route to a miscellaneous destination that points to their cell phones.

I don't why it did not occur to me earlier that I could route all calls as I want internally. The only "down side" if you can even call it that is using up 2 lines internally when a single call is in progress after hours. Logs for a 1 month period show no periods of more then 2 trunks in use at a time however if there is a pandemic and everyone calls at once I don't want people hitting busy signals due to bottle necks in the PBX.

My concerns now are limited to the complexity involved with having the MISC destination select a trunk that is not in use.

I think ill try setting it up with every trunk having a duplicate IVR with the difference between them being the MISC destination they point to always pointing to the next number though I want to play more with how it works in practice. I have 2 hunt groups with 3 numbers each so ill try

hunt 1 line 1 dials out on hunt 1 line 2
hunt 1 line 2 dials out on hunt 1 line 3
hunt 1 line 3 dials out on hunt 2 line 3
hunt 2 line 1 dials out on hunt 2 line 2
hunt 2 line 2 dials out on hunt 2 line 3
hunt 2 line 3 dials out on hunt 1 line 3

Ill update this with what I settle on in the end thanks again for the response it helped me to look at things from a different angle and I at least feel like I am heading in the right direction now.

If you're worried about all the lines busied out because of call volume, consider getting a voipms account for overflow. They are dirt cheap ans allow you to make as many simultaneous calls as your internet connection can handle.....and they allow you to put out whatever caller ID you want. Having that provides a great deal of flexibility that the analog stuff simply can't do!

You could for example use voipms to send out those after hours calls via your misc destinations while dropping the original analog call