Conferencing limitation?

We are running the FreePBX distro and recently one of our users complained about 3-way conferencing. In his mind he was trying to do a simple 3-way conference except that leg 1 of the conference was an incoming call to his extension and leg 2 an outgoing call to the second party.

We explained that for a 3-way conference to work he must initiate both calls i.e. call leg 1 hookflash and then call leg 2 so it would not work with an inbound call.

Afterwards we looked at the conferencing module and set up a conference room which would allow a user to transfer inbound calls to the conference. However this only works with inbound calls as you can not call someone and then transfer the call to another extension (pls correct me if I am wrong).

Anyways is there any way to combine both i.e. to be able to establish a conference with any party no matter if it’s an inbound or outbound call?

You can transfer any call, regardless of whether the call is inbound or outbound.

There are a wide variety of ways to transfer calls. You can do an Asterisk transfer, where Asterisk handles redirecting the call, or your phone can do the transfer.

You can configure who can do Asterisk-based transfers, using the # key, in the General Settings module. The Asterisk Dial Command options setting controls transferring calls on inbound calls. a “t” in this setting will allow the recipient to transfer a call by hitting ##.

The Asterisk Outbound Dial Command options field controls who can transfer a call on outbound calls. A “T” in this setting will allow the caller to transfer a call using the ## key.

The ability of an endpoint, i.e. a phone, to do a transfer is configured by the phone itself.