Future request - Conference bridge, not single rooms connected via IVR

In FreePBX 2.4 or above building of simple conference bridge allowing access to many conference rooms is almost impossible for ordinary user.

FreePBX allow us to create single conference rooms, but there is not possible to access them using Meetme and single telephone number, only call them like ordinary extension.

Conference bridge should give caller chance to choose conference number - it is important when we attach single number as Inbound route for conference from PSTN or SIP trunk. Now we can only do this by pointing this number to the IVR and attach each single conference as IVR submenu - not elegant and very complicated solution. If we want to remove singe conference we have to dig in IVR.

We can try to use our extension defined like below:
[custom-meetme]
exten => STARTMEETME,1,MeetMe(${MEETME_ROOMNUM},${MEETME_OPTS},${PIN})
exten => STARTMEETME,n,Hangup

then use it in “Custom Destinations” like this:
custom-meetme,STARTMEETME,1

attaching it to custom application allow us to reach the Meetme using single extension.
Unfortunately FreePBX store all information about created conferences in:
extensions_additional.conf and in Meetme_additional.conf we have only conference number and user PIN.
So running meeetme as described above we can only attach to conference as user and no additional conference attribute will be set.
I think it is serious disadvantage of FreePBX.

W:P

what are you really trying to achieve? This sounds like a vertical application (conference server, something else). There are several options to accomplish that. It is not the point of FreePBX to be a generic conference server as there are a lot of other requirements if that is what you are trying to do, which is not clear from your message.

Asterisk is not the best choice for a conference server
You should look at freeswitch for that (get someone to tie the two together)

I’m looking to accomplish the same thing. Rather than wasting a bunch of our DIDs, I simply wanted to have one main call in # and then be able to enter the conference extension. I don’t see this as crossing the line from standard use to a conference server…just the ability to give each user their own unique bridge # without burning up 20 DIDs. Anyone suspect this functionality will be available, whether it was a feature addition or a modification we can make on our own?

Thanks in advance for any input!

You can achieve this easily with a couple of options. You can create an IVR where you have IVR options pointing to each conference bridge. Alternatively, you can create an IVR and in the IVR’s custom context, add an include to the ext-meetme context which will give access to all bridges you create.

Assuming IVR id 7 is your IVR where you want to dial all your meetme’s, then you would add the following to extensions_custom.conf:


[ivr-7-custom]
include => ext-meetme

I am building a conference bridge server, and while Web-Meetme gets me part of what I want, it doesn’t do all of it.

I’m going to take a shot at building a FreePBX module that will manage realtime meetme from FreePBX. Among other things, it’ll be able to set up a single DID in the dialplan that goes into MeetMe.

I’m building against 1.6, however, since that includes modifications to app_meetme realtime that I want to be able to support (like start and end times for conferences).