[Sussex] Asterisk/Trixbox

[John Crowhurst]

On Wed, July 12, 2006 22:23, Al Bennett wrote:
> Thank you Jo[h]ns, this is great stuff!
>
> I'll have a look at FreePBX, seems like a sensible idea to bundle a good
> gui
> with Asterisk.
>
> They're going to hook up to BT via three POTS lines, it may not give the
> best quality but at least there's a fallback option of using standard
> handsets should the VOIP stuff fail for some reason.
>
> Some noobie questions:
> - How easy would it be to configure a system where people all handsets can
> ring on an incoming call?

Its done in the extensions.conf on Asterisk. For instance:

s,1,Dial(Zap/1&Zap/2&Zap/3)

All POTS extensions ring at the same time when you recieve an incoming call.

> - Is it fairly straightforward to kind of log on/off so that if there's
> only
> one person in the office other calls go straight to a catch-all voicemail
> once a handset has been picked up?

I'm sure its possible, or you could implement a queue so that the people
waiting could be offered some marketing advertisments while they wait or
listen to some relaxing hold music. You can offer them the ability to
press a key and go to voicemail, or a ringback service when the operator
is free.

> - Is it possible to see the number of voicemail messages waiting on the
> handset?

This would depend on the handset and whether you could display that on the
pjone. Using realtime, the whole asterisk phone system can function via a
mysql database, so a script that polls the extensions and updates the
screen every so often wouldn't be too hard.

> Clearly this is a huge topic!

It certainly is, I'd suggest you look at: http://www.voip-info.org as they
have a very large selection guides on all aspects of VoIP including
Asterisk.

> Many thanks for your help so far
>
> Al

-- 
John