I would like to know if anyone has a way of allowing a user to turn on/off Follow-Me. We have a user that will occaisionally travel, and we’d like to be able to give him a button to turn his follow-me on and off. We’re using Aastra phones, but I think a simple custom extension would work best to allow a quick speed dial. I know that the new version of has the new voicemail menu to allow small IVR, and this may be an option, but I’d like to get a simple button, similar to a call forward on/off function. Dialing *52/extension/forward is a bit hard for this user…A status light on the phone would be perfect to let him know his forward is on…
currently there is no feature code to turn followme on/off. There is a feature request open for it and if someone wants to write the feature code we can look at adding it to the follome module. Otherwise, it’s in the queue as I have been wanting to add that for a while but it just has not raised to the top of the priority list. It wouldn’t take much really. One can take a look at what we already do to check if it is enable or not (you can do it from ARI today so you can see what it is doing to do that). Then it’s a matter of copying something like the DND or CW feature codes and molding it for followme. Probably the most involved part will be to call up Allison and order a couple of sound clips to make it sound professional.
If that is set to EXTENSION then followme is bypassed and sent straight to the extension. The VmX stuff you referred to bypasses that part of the code to allow the FollowMe to be used even when it is ‘off.’
p.s. there is always the option of purchasing support to have it written in which case it would be added a lot quicker, if someone doesn’t jump on this first.
Philippe Lindheimer - FreePBX Project Lead
http//freepbx.org - IRC #freepbx
I’ll jst show them how to use the ARI to turn on/off for now. I don’t really want to get into the insides right now, and would prefer to have something done for us. We currently have a bunch of other systems that we’re trying to get under the hood of, and don’t have time/resources at this time. I rather leave it to the experts…
How long do you think it would take to have it written? I’d be willing to partially fund it if it’s reasonable. I guess the tricky thing would be to assign a lamp to it so that the uers could know what feature was on/off. Similar to the DND button. I guess the ones I’d like to see would be a FWD, FM, Night(0-8). This way, we could program the recep console and know whether or not it was on? This would depend on the phones too. I know that some phones have more buttons with lamps than others, so it’d be limited to the phones…
the Follow Me diaplan is probably no more than a few with testing and verification. The biggest pain is probably missing sound clips that would have to be ordered from Allison or otherwise find some existing ones that aren’t ideal but do the trick.
as far as BLF lights, that is going to take something like func_devstate.c which provides user defined dev states that you could make hints out of to assign to blf programmable keys. But that is in Asterisk trunk and not even in their 1.4 release. I have no idea how solid it is as I have not been tracking it. (And 1.2 would not even be an option). So this would mean you would have to do something like you are describing with an xml browser application. This is the case for any of these keys, DND, CF, FM, daynight, etc.
Philippe Lindheimer - FreePBX Project Lead
http//freepbx.org - IRC #freepbx