'Reverse' conference calling

Hi All,

Very recently started playing with the FreePBX on a Raspberry Pi. So far, so good, however: I’m looking for functionality, that may or may not be already there. I couldn’t find it. Let me explain.

Let’s look at a conference call. All participants are invited in one way or another to, well, participate on a given date and time. They dial the programmed number (in or out office) and voila! Conference!

Now look at the ‘reverse’: All participants (preferably in office) are invited as usual and on the given date and time the conference leader calls a number and the next thing you know is that say 6 phones start ringing, get answered and voila again! The conference is on the way.

The reason I’m looking for this, is that I need to call say two or three phones at the same time (group call) but instead of a group call, where the first phone answered, stops the other phones from keeping ringing, I need the possibility that all phones can be answered independently and simultaneously.

Does anyone know, if such a function exists, what it is called and where it can be found?

Many thanks in advance.

Janvr.

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iSymphony allows you to create conference rooms on the fly, and invite local users. (It will ring their extension and place them in the room.) iSymphony licenses are available in the FreePBX Portal.

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As a lower cost option,

look into adding asterisk call files into /var/spool/asterisk/outgoing “touched” with when you want the call to happen.

Preston:

A few years ago, we had a special module written by Schmooze for emergency paging for our Fire Dept. You called in on a pots line, it paged phones at the fire station, and then anyone could pick up and talk in a conference. I think that functionality was rolled into Paging Pro, but I haven’t played with it.

BF

Thanks for the swift reply.

I think that looking in ‘/var/spool/asterisk/outgoing’ is the lesser option of the two in this case. The ‘reverse’ call will be sort of event driven. So I will not know when it will happen. What I do know in advance is when a given event occurs, which extensions I should dial, this must be programmed in advance, preferably. So in case event one happens, dial 901,910 and 920, in case of event two, dial 820, 811 and 450. For both events goes, that every time three (or actually four, counting the caller) extensions must be able to converse with each other.

It will be undoable to program that ‘on the fly’, I think.

Nevertheless, tomorrow I shall look into both options and let you know.

Thanks!

Janvr.

Then I suggest a fail-safe methodology would be to write a script that creates one call.file for each pertinent extension to connect that extension to a conference bridge

http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+cmd+Conference

that way you can control who has what role and the call.files can be “pre-touched” as appropriate, the moderator getting his call before the rest.

The whole script being automatically triggered by the “event” being noticed, incron is ideal for such scenarios.

Hi i’m currently working also on this subject.
the /spool way of doing it looks good.
i’ve done the following but i have specific things on my conference
my conf have no password but before i join an ivr than will redirect me after password checking to the conference.
i’va also tried it as normal with or woithou password.
remember that the fist number on the channel will be the distant to join
and extension will be the conf number