We are trying to implement a security procedure that will allow us to page all phones and turn on strobes in the building. The strobes I purchased are SIP strobes and they turn on when a voicemail is left for the assigned extension. Currently, we have to page all the phones, speak the emergency message, hang up, call the strobes extension, leave a random message and hang up. Then we have to delete that message to turn the strobes back off.
I’m trying to think of better ways to do this so that we only have to make one call. The best option I can think of is to leave a voicemail message for the strobe extension and then some how relay that same message to the paging group after the voicemail saves. I have no idea how this would work though.
It would be great if someone could help me do this or if anyone has any other options that would work for me.
You could try adding a custom extension that dials local/*8000 (where 8000 is your “strobe phone” )to your (forced) page group, I’ve never tried it though.
This will almost work, but you would want to custom dial to “local/*8000@from-internal”. Possibly even better is to create a feature code with Misc Application to Strobe extension VM with the “no msg” option to suppress the vm greeting, then custom extension to that feature code.
Now I have to come up with an easy way to turn the strobe off. I was thinking it would be ideal to put in an option to turn them off in our Emergency IVR menu that I created. Any way you could think of to do that? I would hate to make the users dial into the strobes vm and delete the message just to turn off the strobe.
Wow, never knew you could call simple shell commands into a dial plan.
So you’re saying if I put that is extensions_custom.conf, create a trunk, and create an outbound route to that trunk, it should call that command? Interesting… I could then create an option in the IVR to dial through to that trunk. Not sure where it would take the call though. What kind of message would the user get?