We are looking at using FreePBX as a standalone Voicemail Server for a carrier switch that doesn’t provide integrated voicemail. We have everything working except one little thing. We haven’t figured out how to have all SIP MWI Notifies sent back to the switch.
We know the switch can receive SIP notifies and route them to the stations as we have tested a different Voicemail system and that works. The issue with the other Voicemail system is the cost and the fat that it doesn’t support multiple languages.
We also tried to buy support from Sangoma so they can help us set this up, but they won’t provide an estimate and a quick feasibility assessment which is a requirement from our client before any purchase.
I’ve seen this a handful of times in Support, and it is always done by referencing an external script with the externnotify parameter. The linked document downplays this as a solution, but the sip parameters required to make NOTIFY work don’t get written by FreePBX, so it doesn’t appear to be a workable solution for FreePBX.
Asterisk is an open source project, so “control” really involves everyone as everyone can contribute changes and additional features. Ultimately it doesn’t work the way you want as that functionality hasn’t really been written by anyone.
Then why is there documentation that says it can be done?
Instead you can statically define an entry for each mailbox in the voicemail server’s sip.conf file, indicating where the message notifications are to be sent. Rather than defining the address of each endpoint, however, you can have the voicemail server send all messages to the proxy, which will handle the relay of the message notifications to the appropriate endpoints
I thought you wanted one configuration that just “worked”. From an Asterisk perspective if individual configuration entries are created then it would work, Asterisk would send such information out as if it were sending it to an endpoint. Whether that works within the context of your remote system depends on what exactly it expects within the SIP NOTIFY Messages itself in regards to the contents (if it needs the headers to be something specific, or if it’s just the mailbox within the payload itself).
This is only from an Asterisk perspective, I don’t speak for FreePBX in that regard as it configures Asterisk.
Nobody is saying Asterisk can’t do this, I am saying that FreePBX does not generate the necessary sip.conf parameters when you create an extension in the GUI, which will make it somewhat difficult to maintain and administer.
We are using FreePBX as it is simpler to configure mailboxes with the FreePBX GUI. But what we are really interested in is knowing if we can modify the Asterisk configuration to send ALL MWIs to a single IP as mentioned in the provided documentation.
Since the documentation seems to be based on an outdated version of Asterisk, we need to know if any changes would be required. And is their a way to set is as a global configuration that applies to all extensions.
The main VoIP switch we are using is already capable of receiving standard SIP MWI notifies from an external source and routing them to the proper extensions based on the SIP URI in the header.
No, there is no ability to do that. There is no ability in Asterisk to configure one thing and have all unsolicited MWIs sent there. The only way is to configure individual entries (be it SIP peers or PJSIP endpoints) for each mailbox like in the documentation you linked to.
Sorry, you are in the wrong place, I would budget a few thousand dollars at least. My understanding is that you want to subvert the one to one voicemail association of a user/voicemail box to something more abstract.
but their media server is quite flexible.