PBX operations taxonomy
A small-business phone system has five group-distribution primitives, and Orbit ships a dashboard page for each under Voice. Operators mis-route mostly over vocabulary — “hunt group”, “ring group”, “paging”, and “park orbit” mean one thing on an Asterisk box, another on 3CX, and a third on a legacy on-prem PBX. This page is the router: it fixes one definition per primitive, gives a decision matrix for the call shapes that recur, and hands you to the operator guide for the primitive you picked. Use this page as the front door when a request names a wrong-era feature name. Once the decision is made, work the linked operator guide end-to-end.The five primitives
The older term for “ring group” is hunt group — on legacy PBXs the hunt strategy (circular, longest-idle, sequential) is the ring-group strategy selector on Orbit. When a vendor, MSP, or prior phone admin asks about a hunt group, the answer is the ring group page — the strategy list preserves the legacy naming.
Decision matrix per call shape
Two primitives pair often: the reception line (SLA) plus a paging group to floor-announce “call parked on slot 1”. Hot-desking also pairs with any of the above — it decides which devices a member’s phone actually rings on.
When NOT to use this page
A router page can be mis-read as a comprehensive guide. Stay on the page for primitive selection only. Leave when the task is:- Callers must hold in order, agents ranked by skill, wrap-up time between calls — that is a queue, not a bigger ring group (below).
- Number-level routing (which DID answers into what) — Pick the right inbound routing for a DID.
- A whole-team seating chart, extensions, and memberships — Voice teams.
- Endpoint provisioning (SIP credentials, handset roll-out) — Extensions and desk phones.
- A day-two runbook for the whole estate — UCaaS day-two operations routes recurring tasks; this page only picks a primitive.
Graduate to a queue
The five primitives above are live-call distribution; they do not hold callers in order. A queue is the CCaaS routing layer with FIFO holding, skills-based agent assignment, SLA timers, overflow policies, and analytics. The trigger list for graduating:- callers must FIFO-hold rather than ring-everyone;
- agents need to be ranked by skill or language;
- measured service-level targets exist;
- the team needs wrap-up time between calls.
Worked pattern: a 10-seat SMB without dedicated desks
A ten-person team where everyone floats and no one owns a desk:- Hot-desk the phones. Provision one shared SIP credential per physical phone; every agent signs in at the start of the shift and the phone routes as them. Walk-up sign-in covers most shifts; the reservation calendar covers booked seats.
- SLA the main DID. Point the main number at a shared line so anybody with an open desk rings — no dedicated receptionist.
- Park the overflow. Calls that need a colleague outside the conversation move via call park, retrieved from whichever desk that person signed in at.
- Page the floor. A paging group reaches all desk speakers for “call parked on 1” without ringing.
- Ring group per team. The sales DID uses a ring-all strategy so the entire team’s signed-in devices ring; hot-desking guarantees the right devices are live.
- Fallback to voicemail. Every DID route carries a voicemail fallback so an empty roster never drops the call — Pick the right inbound routing for a DID covers fallback wiring.
Glossary and further reading
- Hunt group (vocabulary page) — the legacy ring-group term resolves to a matching entry in the Glossary.
- On-call escalation — for engineer paging ladders (not SMB phone distribution), the on-call escalation stack routes its own four-guide system.
- Associating numbers to teams — Voice teams.