Time Conditions for FollowMe? (Ticket #2108)

General Help
1

I am wondering whatever happened to the request for time conditions to be available in FollowMe settings… It is a frequent request by people we assist with FreePBX that they want to be able to control the times of day that the FollowMe is active.

I do not see this capability in FreePBX at the moment, though this idea was “accepted in concept” in Ticket #2108 over 2 years ago.

Any word? Update? Am I missing anything? Thanks!

2

Many people want it (more than just enabling/disabling, usually more granular on each member of the follow-me).

It is a relatively complex change to Follow-Me that no one has been motivated to do. It also require the User Portal (ARI) to be changed as well to accomodate any such additions.

I am sure there are developers who would do it for a fee but given the relative complexity of the changes, it would not be an inexpensive feature to implement. The paid support and professional services team at FreePBX would also be in a position to develop it but again, at a cost.

So like many other features, it is hanging out there waiting for an interesting party to come along and step up to the plate. So is the nature of Open Source…

3

If so many people are asking for it, why not have a “pledges board” or something where people can contribute to specific features and when a dollar goal is met, the project is done by FreePBX staff or others commissioned to do so in return for the bounty?

4

Lots of people have tried to do Bounty’s. The incident rate of people paying up who made commitments is not stellar.

To work, people would have to pay up front into an escrow.

The problem with something like this is there is probably easily several hundred dollars or more of work to get started just to get to the point of being able to come up with a reasonable estimate, which is probably in the thousands of dollars to do. If you look around at what most people are usually willing to pledge, you’ll see that it’s going to take a log of commitments.

You are of course welcome to try and rally people behind the cause and see how much $ you can get behind it to attract someone to work on this…

5

I have a work around that I’m using for this, which can all be configured within FreePBX. It takes a few steps, but works.

  1. setup extension with voicemail
  2. Setup ring group (I use 2XXX where XXX is the original extension for the group number). ring group extension list should be NXXNXXXXXX# for the person’s cell phone. ring time is 19 seconds (1 second less than their phone takes to play voicemail). Destination if no answer is the unavailable message of the original XXX extension.
  3. Setup time group you want for hours that the forwarding should work.
  4. Setup time condition using the time group you just name and if true go to the ring group you just made, if false, send it to the unavailable voicemail for the original XXX extension.
  5. Setup the followme for the XXX extension to go to the time condition you just created.

This has the desired effect for me, causing phones to be forwarded during business hours, but regardless of time of day the voicemail the customer gets is the internal voicemail, not the employees cell phone voicemail.

6

Can you tell me how to add the time condition to the follow me. On my freepbx box it is wanting a extension or phone number?

7

James

This is a 2 year old thread. I doubt much has been done with this request. There is no time conditions for follow me.