Broadcast message to non-speakerphone handsets

General Help
1

Hi,

I’ve been tasked with finding out if it’s possible to ring all extensions on our FreePBX simultaneously and either broadcast a message from a calling handset or play a pre-recorded message. My first thought was to look at the Paging module, however having run some tests - this works perfectly with our office phones (a mixture of Cisco / Linksys SPA942, SPA962 and SPA525), but not with the phones in the classrooms that don’t have speakerphone capabilities (Cisco / Linksys SPA301 & SPA901).

Is anyone aware of either a free or commercial module that will allow such behaviour ? We are basically looking to alert all staff quickly and easily in the case of an emergency and would like to implement any one of the following options:

  1. Ring all handsets in a ring group and as each one is answered, play a pre-recorded message individually to each handset.
  2. Ring all handsets in a ring group and continuously loop a message to all handsets at the same time, so if a call is picked up when the message is halfway through, the user can listen to the whole message again.
  3. Same as 1 or 2 by for a live message spoken into a calling handset.

Any help / direction that anyone can provide would be gratefully received.

Thanks.

2

Paging for phones that have auti-answer, call files for phones without.

If they have voicemail then make the waittime less than 16 seconds and plenty of retries

3

I’m using call files to call my paging group, this way it is the asterisk system that is placing the call. The paging group handles sending it off to the phones I choose and enables auto answer or whisper if they are on the phone. The call file makes this call hidden to the receptionist’s phone so there is no chance someone downstairs would notice. So far it seems like the perfect use of these two features to accomplish my goal. Just waiting on the hardware to arrive then I can give this a full test.

4

Thanks dicko - I’m grateful for the advice and the quick response.

I’ve setup a test call file and so far it looks very promising.

I’m aiming to call 50 extensions simultaneously (so can make use of your script above with a custom ring group), which I’d ideally like to trigger from a custom extension, so in an emergency situation, any senior staff member who knows the custom extension number could trigger the alert. I’ve read that this can be accomplished using AGI in the dialplan - is this the most appropriate way to do this or am I overlooking something obvious ?

5

I think the easiest way would be to just use a custom context that just calls TrySystem(yourscript)

I would at least stagger 50 cal over 10 seconds or so, if you don’t have a lot of computepower ,