Creating schedules

FortiVoice has two methods for creating a schedule, Calendar and Standard, both of which are used to create the schedules outlined within this recipe. FortiVoice contains three example schedules (business_hours, after_hours, and holiday) and a schedule called any_time which can be used to handle calls for any time that is not configured within a separate schedule. As a best practice, the following is recommended:

• Create a Standard schedule to handle your holidays.
• Create a Calendar based schedule for your business hours.
• Use the any_time schedule to handle time outside of business hours.

A holiday schedule should use the Standard based schedule, which allows for the quick addition of holidays. The holiday schedule will run for the entire day so no time ranges are required.

By default, FortiVoice uses a schedule called any_time to handle hours that have not already been configured within a schedule. For example, if you have a business hours schedule for 10 AM to 6 PM but no other schedule created, the hours outside that schedule (6 PM to 9 AM the next day) will be handled by the any_time schedule.

To add holiday dates in a Standard based schedule:

1. Go to Phone System > Profile > Schedule and click New.
2. Enter a Name (in this example, Custom_holiday), set Mode to Standard, and click Create.



3. Once created, select the schedule from the list and click Edit.
4. Expand Holiday and click New.



5. Select the Date and enter a Description, and click Create.



The new holiday is added to the list.

6. Click OK.

To create a Calendar based schedule for your business hours:

1. Go to Phone System > Profile > Schedule and click New.
2. Enter a Name (in this example, Custom_business), set Mode to Calendar, and click Create.



3. Once created, select the schedule from the list and click Edit.
4. You will be presented with the calendar view. Click New.



5. Enter a Title, a Start time, and an End time. These are your business operation hours (in this example, 10 AM to 6 PM). Then click None next to Recurrence to configure a recurrent frequency.



6. Set the following Recurrence Setting. In this example, an indefinite weekday-only schedule that occurs every week.
7. Click OK, and then Create.



The calendar view shows the business hours schedule automatically populated for each day that was selected.

To define different hours for the weekend:

In this example, weekends will be defined as reduced-hour workdays.

1. Within your existing business calendar, click New.



2. Enter a Title, a Start time, and an End time. This is your reduced operation hours (in this example, 10 AM to 2 PM).

Note that the date shown here is today/the day you are creating this schedule, and happens to be a weekday. Leave this as it is. Then click None next to Recurrence to configure a recurrent frequency.



3. Set the following Recurrence Setting. In this example, an indefinite weekend-only schedule that occurs every week. Note that Recurring start is greyed-out, and is again set to today. This does not matter, as only the days specified in the Recurring on fields will be affected by this schedule.

Click OK, and then Create.



The calendar view shows the newly created weekend hours automatically populated alongside the regular business hours.

To define unique hours for a specific date:

The benefit to using calendar-based schedules is that they are perpetual schedules that can be easily edited. For example, you may want to edit your business hours for one specific date.

1. Go to Phone System > Profile > Schedule and edit your existing calendar-based business schedule.
2. Click the calendar event on the date that you would like to edit (for example, this coming Friday, October 11th).

Be sure to click the event itself and not the area surrounding the event, otherwise a new event will be created instead.



3. Change the hours as necessary, and click OK. In this example, the End time has been reduced from 6 PM to 2 PM.



4. Before the new time can take effect, set Select Event Range to Current event only, meaning that only this specific day will be affected. Click OK.