No, my issue ticket was put in and no real priority to get this corrected. The deficiency was acknowledged though. Many others have come up with various workarounds to get an easy “Transfer to VM”.
I came up with a workaround that is easy. We are using Sangoma phones, and the Endpoint Manager.
We are using the short & long BLF press. In a rather small office, we will setup each extension as a BLF on the phone. A short press will do a transfer (either blind or attended, depending on your other FreePBX settings), a long press will do a Transfer to VM (*+ext).
To set the long press behavior do the following: From FreePBX navigate to Settings → Endpoint Manager → Brands, Sangoma → Options Tab. In the Options look for “BLF Long Press Idle State” (this is the state of the associated BLF extension). Put an “*” in this field. Click Apply. Be sure to then Save & Rebuild Configurations in Extension Mapping. Send Config to extension or allow it to pick it up on its own.
I hope that this helps. If you are still looking for a solution not using a BLF key, then there are several forum threads that suggest programming a phone key as a DTMF key, with the appropriate Transfer to VM activation with a “+” following, etc.
I also discussed both solutions, gathered from others in this thread:
In regards to wiki references for the BLF button programming, look here:
https://wiki.freepbx.org/display/PHON/BLF+Key+Presses
Good luck!