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Editing Personal Call Handling Rules For Other Users in ShoreTel

This is one of those guides that requires some knowledge of relational databases and the confidence to edit your ShoreWare Director Database without screwing it up.
You’ll need some software on your ShoreTel Server to do this. I prefer HeidiSQL but you can use any MySQL GUI that you prefer. You can even install PHPMyAdmin if you want. The hardcore can just use the shell. The relevant database that you want to connect to is on port 4308, it’s called “shoreware”. The username is root, and the password is “shorewaredba”. You can find all this information with a quick Google Search, the ShoreTel forums, Reddit, and even on the ShoreTel server itself if you poke around enough so I’m not terribly concerned giving it away here.
The annoying thing about a vanilla ShoreTel server is there isn’t any way to do Nuisance Call Blocking except Personalized Call Handling Rules on each individual Communicator. There’s also no way to add new rules to a user’s Communicator in the Director. Outside of some third-party software I’ve heard of, or some extra software from ShoreTel you have to either walk a user through this process or do it on their computer yourself. That changes now.

Editing Someone Else’s Personalized Call Handling Rules On Your ShoreTel Server

Step 1 – Create the rule on your own ShoreTel Communicator. You do this in the Options Menu under “Personalized Call Handling”. Just make the exact rule you want on the other user’s Communicator. Please note I’m using ShoreTel version 14.2 as the example.

Step 2 – Remote into your server and fire up your mySQL editor and connect to the configuration database.

Step 3 – Look for the table ecrrules. Your rule will probably be the newest rule in there, but you can look at the tables ecractions and ecrnumbers to verify which rule is yours. The field “RuleID” is the foreign key that ties them all together.

Step 4 – Once you’ve determined which rule is yours, simply change the extension in the UserDN field from your extension to the user who needs the rule’s extension. HeidiSQL is nice enough to give you a list when you click on it.

Step 5 – Verify in Director under “Personal Options” of the user that the rule shows up.

Step 6 – The rule is in the new user’s Personal Options now. If not check to make sure you put the right extension in the ECRULES table.

If you want to edit the rules you can change the fields. Simple things like the phone number or destination number are easy to edit under the ecractions and ecrnumbers table. I would not change the parameters of the rule or anything like that. If you need to change what the rule does, I would delete it in Director, make a new one that does what you need and do steps 1-6 above. For instance, if you mistyped the caller ID the rule needs to check for you can change that in the database, if you want it to forward to an inside line not an outside line, I’d start over since doing that would require changing several things in multiple tables and it’s easy to get confused.

If you are not familiar with how relational databases work, stay away from this. It’s pretty simple but you can mess something up fairly easily if you aren’t careful.

 

2 replies on “Editing Personal Call Handling Rules For Other Users in ShoreTel”

Mate, this is great stuff… How is the “personalized call handling” enabled though? I cant see the option in my communicator client.

Personalized Call handling is only available if you have the Professional version of Communicator or better. This is the “Access License” in ShoreTel Director. So you’d need to set yourself higher, but this uses up a Professional License on your ShoreTel server. Some places only assign these if you need the features.

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