[TriLUG] Semi-OT: Asterisk Parking setup

[Jon Carnes]

Brian, if I'm reading this correctly then I think what you want to do is
assign certain extensions as defined conference rooms, then let the
receptionist "park" a caller in a specific conference room. Anyone in
the company can then attach to those extensions at will to talk to the
"parked" party.

Jon

On Mon, 2011-03-14 at 17:22 -0400, Brian Henning wrote:
> Hi Gang,
> 
> I've just deployed an Asterisk-powered VOIP PBX at my company.  So far, so
> good.  We have Cisco/Linksys SPA942 desk phones.
> 
> I think Asterisk's default call parking function is awful.  Blind transfer
> followed by a callback from the PBX with the line number?  Way too much room
> for error / failure, and involves too many button presses.
> 
> With the 942s, I can configure line buttons with BLF and speed-dial on
> parking lot extensions.  What I'd love to do is combine that with a smart
> dialplan to result in the following flow for parking a call:
> 
> 1) First user (receptionist, perhaps) optionally places call on hold
> 2) User presses a free (glowing green) parking line key
> 3) User hangs up
> 4) Another user picks up the phone and presses the now occupied parking lot
> line key (now red)
> 5) The new user talks to the parked person.
> 
> This would require Asterisk to respond to the parking lot extension as
> follows, wherein lies the rub:
> 
> 1) See if parking lot is occupied.  If so, pick up the parked call.
> 2) If not, magically figure out what channel the held call on the current
> SIP extension is on
> 3) Bridge the current call with the held channel and park on the specified
> lot
> (4) If park fails (another thread beat us to the lot, e.g.), place the
> inbound call back on hold and play a message/send text to the user
> 
> What I haven't been able to figure out:
>  -- How can Asterisk determine the channel of a held call for a given SIP
> extension?
>  -- How can I specify a parking lot (override default FCFS behavior)?
>  
> 
> If this can't be done by clever extensions.conf engineering, might it be
> possible through a separate app?  I've never written an Asterisk app before,
> but it sounds like a fun challenge...
> 
> Cheers and many thanks,
> ~Brian
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------ 
>           Brian Henning, Software Engineer
> 
>     /\    Pine Research Instrumentation 
>    //\\   5908 Triangle Drive 
>   ///\\\  Raleigh, NC 27617 
>  ////\\\\ USA 
>     || 
>     ||    phone: 919.782.8320 
>           fax:   919.782.8323 
>           email: bhenning at pineinst.com 
> ------------------------------------------------------ 
> 
> 
> 
-- 
---
"Be yourself... unless you suck."
                  Josh Whedon