Changing what phone and extension goes to baesd of building extension code

Verticals Education
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1

Hi, Recently my organization has been preparing to make the switch from using Cisco Call Manager to FreePBX. We are a school that has multiple different sites and still run ATAs at each site to run the PA. With our current CUCM setup if you dial *21 it will dial you to that buildings ATA so that you can make an announcement. Each school has a different extension starting prefix for example one location uses 58XX another uses 52XX. I was wonder if I could get help creating a custom dialplan to make this possible or let me know if there is an already existing settings within the GUI to do this. Thanks for the help!

2

We have a very similar set up. Multiple sites, one FreePBX server. Different extension prefixes for each site. Connecting to a SIP paging device (although an ATA would be no different).
I wrote custom contexts in extensions_custom.conf and then assigned the extensions for that site to the newly created context.
Here is what one site’s context looks like. No idea if it is written using good form or if there is a better way to do these things, but it has been working for 3 years without any issues.

[from-40-phones]
;dial 0 to call office ring group
exten => _0,1,Dial(Local/40900@from-internal)

;allow access to local paging
exten => 40920,1,Goto(from-internal,40920,1)

;deny other school's 92X extensions
exten => _XX92X,1,Answer()
exten => _XX92X,n,Playback(access-denied)
exten => _XX92X,n,Hangup()

;include default context
include => from-internal
3

On this note I wish I had been working 20+ years ago when our schools were set up. Then I could have made it so the schools have their own consistent extensions. Right now, x2319 could be at school A and then x4225 could be at that same school. Makes it so hard.

I’d love to just say start it all over from scratch, but I’m sure we’d have thousands of unhappy teachers and it’s a lot of work for nearly 30 schools.

4

Thank you for this! I was able to modify it slightly and was able to get my configuration working the way I need it to. That knocks another thing off for this conversion.