Plan Temporary Greeting?

General Help
1

Hi,

Using FreePBX 12.0.76.2

I would like to know if there is a way to record a temporary greeting but not activate it right away.

We use the feature a lot (recording temporary greetings for vacations, etc.) but it’d be really awesome if we could record it in advance and have it playing between specific dates.

Any way to do that?

Thanks!

2

Time conditions + Time groups maybe?

I never tried this but it looks like it could do that…

Good luck and have a nice day!

Nick

3

if :-

/var/spool/asterisk/voicemail/{context}/{exten}/temp.wav

(by default {context} is “default” , but that depends on how you set it up) exists , it will be played, regardless , so maybe work with that files’ existence in that location with a cron job or two

It should of course be readable by the asterisk user. With a bit of jiggery-pokery I bet you could add that to the FreePBX time conditions, almost always there is an #include custom* in that context, instead of needing a cron job (or two), an “exercise for the student” there :wink:

4

Hmmmmm.

You’ve described a non-computable problem. You will need some kind of management interface for this unless you want to change the perspective on how you want it to work…

Here’s my reasoning:

  • You want to have the messages “in the can” in the event something happens. That’s easy. You can use the system recordings interface to record as many messages as you want.

  • The recoding module can connect a new recording to a dial code so that it can be listened to, in case you want to have someone check out the message before you fire it up.

Once you get started down that path, you have a bank of message “in case” you need one. How would you establish the reason for using each one? It’s a rhetorical question - just think about how you want to use it.

Using time conditions, you can set up a “holiday” schedule and you can start out the sequence of contexts with “play a message.” You can go nuts with time conditions - I usually set up time condition sequences for “Closed for the holiday” that connects to the 12-ish annual holidays, plus whatever “special” days off the company may want to have (Home shows, conventions, bar mitzvahs, etc.). After that, you have the “we’re open” condition that plays a welcome message (or doesn’t), followed by the “Time Condition failed” context of “It’s night, are you nuts” with another message.

Each recording has a follow-on context that does what the message says (Send the caller to Voicemail, dial an off-campus calling service, etc.)

After that, the messages could be connected to specific actions in the dial-plan. Instead of sending calls to extensions or ring-groups, you send them to messages which have follow-on actions.

There may be other conditions where this “message with a follow-on context” model doesn’t work, but I predict about 80%+ of your needs should be handled that way.