Multiple Parking Lots in Asterisk 1.6x

I don’t see any support for this in FreePBX but I wonder if anyone here has ever had this same question:

I thought Asterisk 1.6 had the ability to create multiple parking lots; for example the sales dept and customer service each have a different park extension with multiple, separate parking slots.

To calrify:

I thought sales could transfer a call to 700 to park it and that call could go to the 701 thru 709 slots.

Then customer service could transfer a call to 710 to park it and that call could go to slots between 711 and 719.

Was I mistaken? If not how do you do it and what’s the syntax?

I couldn’t find any documentation on it so any clues would be greatly appreciated.

Multiple parking lots work in Asterisk 1.6.

There is no support in FreePBX for it.

It is fairly complicated as the parking lot group needs to be specified as a dial string option.

Bueller? Bueller? Anybody? Anybody?

I’m still searching for answers and can’t find any samples or examples anywhere here or on asterisk.org

I thought for sure I heard Asterisk 1.6.x could do multiple parking lots even though FreePBX doesn’t support it.

If it’s there I would think it would be a great addition to the FreePBX system and help all us folks who have wet dreams about an easy to manage, psuedo, multi tenant system.

Even a company that wanted parking lots for individual departments would love to see some support for this.

Have you seen anything that would give me some clues about how to do it.

Sure, it’s in the Asterisk documentation. Consists of a variable to be set during the dial command and also sections in the parkingxxx.conf files.

Have you done it yourself?

I looked at the sample but I didn’t see anything in the Asterisk documentation table of contents about parking or parking lots.

I have a client who wants a “psuedo multi tenant” system. I can give him most of what he wants with route permissions but, as is, they would all share the same parking lot.

That won’t work because each tenant wants their own moh and moh themes.

They’re going to route everything through a receptionist and single user queues might be a solution but that’s a blind transfer. Multiple parking lots makes it an attended transfer. Excecs don’t like blind transfers in my experience so I am looking for a solution instead of a workaround.

I got it to work on bare bones Asterisk. Since each user has to be bound to a parking context and that information passed in the dial string it would take a significant amount of effort to incorporate this feature into FreePBX.

When I was testing I followed these instructions:

I also made mention of my findings in this post:

http://www.trixbox.org/forums/trixbox-forums/help/multiple-parking-lots-0

Please note in my screen shot that I was able to get both parking lots working.

If you set the variable parkinglot prior to the dial command any execution of the park() command would park to that slot.

Further you can set hints so you could map a button to the parking slots.

What would need to happen:

[list]
[] Parking lot module updated to generate multiple lots in features.conf
[
] Additional field added to users table with name of parking lot
[*] Dial plan code added that would set the parkinglot variable prior to executing dialparties.agi
[/list]

I for one would contribute to a bounty to develop this feature.

What you really want is a Shared Extension Appearance. That feature doesn’t exist and I can’t sugar coat that fact for you. Multiple parking lot support in FreePBX would bridge this functionality gap.

I know Philippe had some interest in supporting it. I am willing to document and support the testing of the dialplan changes.

The start for this would be to enter a feature request and see if we can get it set as a 2.8 milestone.

I would be with you 100% on getting the Freepbx team to support this. It’s not just some wierd, “off the mission” idea for people who want multi-tenant support. I understand why multi tenant systems are not an objective of FreePBX and I’m ok with that.

I just think it is important to have parking lots for each department of a single tenant’s system so they can give callers a more professional and personalized experience.

In my years of experience calling Microsoft, IBM, Lotus and Cisco for answers I know they have different themes when they park me to advertise, give tech tips, entertain me with cool tunes to keep me on the hook or annoy me enough with bad music to get me to give up.

Thanks again for your help and input,

Michael
Villa Hills, KY - just across the river from OH

I do agree this is not a multi-tenant feature. It’s department level.

As far a different MOH per workgroup that works today.

I planted the seeds let’s see what kind of comments we get back. My estimate is 10 hours to write, test and document the feature.

If that is accurate it could be done for around a $1000.00

You will have to enlighten me on this someday. It’s late, I am spent and bet you are too.

Lately, these forums seem to have been a dead zone. I had some real challenges on upgrades from 1.4x to 1.6x and all my questions seemed to fall into black holes.

I always try to answer more questions than I ask and got some good feedback from those that I’ve helped lately but the “Karma” didn’t come back around until I hit you up for more info on "Parking Lot(s).

Get some rest. Thanks again,

Michael

Maybe it has something to do with the fish? (g)

The 1.4/1.6 thing has been covered ad nauseam, When I answer question I am trying to generate new content.

I also tend to answer thoughtful questions where someone has simply reached a point where they are stuck. Clear effort must be demonstrated.

Is multiple park lots still being bantered around? And I would be willing to add to the bounty.

I would definitely like this as well.

I have multi-tenant Asterisk installations already happening today just using FreePBX and custom contexts, outbound routes for each tenant to manipulate dial strings, etc to allow the same feel as if on a separate system. Except for parking lots.

Its actually easy to do everything else - create extensions as 5551112222101, 5551112222102, 555111222103, etc. They are all in a custom context to specific outbound routes. The one that matters takes their dial string of 10X, prepends with 5551112222 to then dial the other extensions. *80, *, **, all work fine. Then I set the extension to masquerade as 10X, instead of 555111222210X. Then I customize the templates for each extension to label the display on the phone as 10X, instead of $username.

Easy as … point and click. Except for parking lots.

I have an idea somewhere in my brain about creating an additional view in FreePBX to view “customers”. This auto generates the custom contexts for you and internal routes to dial. Then for each extension, there would be an additional field called “extension”, and another field called authid. Two separate things, but can work together. Then the “extension” field would show the proper info automagically in the templates for each phone, so I don’t have to customize each phone’s template manually. Hopefully when all this is done multiple parking lots will also be a viable option.

We made it clear that multiple parking lots is a departmental issue. Until a single operator can transfer and pull calls out of each parking lot the feature makes no sense for the enterprise.

Philippe has articulated this mission many times, in this blog most recently:

http://www.freepbx.org/news/2012-09-20/freepbx-extension-routing-module

FreePBX is not designed to be a multi-tenant system. I know folks have revenue models and have tried to do this. Nobody is stopping you but certainly we are not encouraging that use case.

Virtualization is the key. It is getting closer. And when stock Asterisk can be reliably virtualized you will have your true multi-tenant FreePBX solution.

When you say virtualization, what do you mean? As in a virtual sub process???

I mean a full virtual instance per tenant.

Verious strategies exist in shared kernel VM’s for DAHDI today.

Some advances allow Asterisk to run headless in a KVM without DAHDI in 10 but I think we are going to see full KVM support in 11.

I don’t ever think that cloud computing such as the Amazon solution will ever be viable for anything but test and home deployements. A closely managed virtual machine is a real possibility now.

FreePBX already supports sharing a MySQL server for multiple instances.

One other option that is a very viable business model is to purchase managed hosted PBXact from Schmooze. They have a commercial kernel with shared DAHDI working today with a reseller friendly per seat licensing arrangement.