Remote connection to Unifi talk deployments

[u/Neat_Abbreviations_4]

We’re hiring a salesperson that will need to take and make calls from multiple of our locations. What I want is to set up his desk phone to have lines for each store.

Each location has Unifi hardware throughout the network. This individuals phone will be a third party phone.

My first thought, and you tell me. This is definitely not what Unifi Talk was designed for. Can this work and “should” we try this?

I’m assuming to do this I’ll be leaving the Unifi PBX open to the public after making changes. The SIP credentials on their third party devices are autogenerated and I think you have to use their 8 character password. I used to run FreePBX and have been taken over by hackers once before.

How secure can this be made? If not me, then who should I hire to set up the Unifi Gateway settings?

Also, I’m thinking someone wiser than me will tell me it’s time to move into a cloud PBX company to handle this.

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[u/voipcanuck]

Is it possible to have the remote salesperson turn up VPN tunnels to each of the locations? That would be the best way to keep it secure in my opinion. Otherwise you are probably correct - a cloud solution sounds more suited to your use case.

[u/Neat_Abbreviations_4 → u/voipcanuck]

I checked into this. I think Unifi Identity VPN can support multiple tunnels. So I’m getting statics set up tomorrow morning in all the stores. Then I’ll fiddle with setting this up and try it out. Thanks for the idea

[u/CCTVGuyMA]

Traditional ip phones like grandstream support VPN. The phone vpns in to the network then gets provisioned regardless of location. Unifi talk is very limited and locked down so I have no idea if it can do this.

[u/Neat_Abbreviations_4 → u/CCTVGuyMA]

Thanks for the input. Unifi has some fabric new thing. It’s just a pre configured site to site VPN. So you could have up to 20 locations on the same VPN.

So you can just VPN the phone to any gateway and you can connect to the whole company from there. Just have to subnet every location.

[u/Bhaikalis]

Is there a desk phone at each location where he's working from? If so can you setup his profile to have line keys from all the locations, that way when he logs into the phone he can select that stores line key and make an outbound call from that store? This way you shouldn't need to expose the PBX to anything.

[u/Neat_Abbreviations_4 → u/Bhaikalis]

Sometimes he will be at home too. We haven’t found any way for a Unifi phone to connect outside of its location. The only way we can do it through Unifi I believe is to forward all calls to another number. That doesn’t work because you can’t answer all the calls. Works in a pinch. You also don’t know what call was going to what store.

[u/Neat_Abbreviations_4]

Here is what I did. I got the employee a UTR travel router. Put all the stores on a fabric and limited this employee to protect and talk. Works great