I work for a school using a FreePBX server. They had an old phone system that they could dial * when an outside line was ringing, and it would pick it up instantly if they were in the call group or not. This allowed the Administrator to be in her office and not distrubed by the phone when she shut her door, but if the phone was ringing and there was no one to answer, she could just dial * and pick it up.
Is there any way to make a feature code in which she could dial something like ## and pickup a call coming from the sip provider? I had her dial **100 followed by send and it worked some of the time, but sometimes put the call on park.
One of the things that was originally said was [quote=“philipt, post:1, topic:43678”]
when an outside line was ringing,
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On FreePBX (and Asterisk in general) we don’t differentiate between incoming calls from outside the network and calls from inside the network, so directed pickup will pick up any call made to an extension that’s ringing, regardless of the source. This may or may not be what you are looking for, since you made a point of “incoming” calls being differentiated.
The obvious solution is to make everyone part of the same pickup group (which is different than making them part of a ring group) or groups and allowing anyone to use *8 to pick up any ringing phone in the system. As you work through the reality of the system, you may find that having a couple of different pickup groups (and having people be part of one or more of them) actually works the way you’re hoping it will.
In small installations, where everyone is largely working together (e.g., school offices, small insurance companies, restaurants, almost anything “mom and pop”) people will often set up the phones so that they just all ring (being in a ring group). Obviously, for some organizations, you’ll have one person whose phone should only ring when they really want to answer. There are lots of strategies that allow you to do this, including things like excluding “the boss’” phone from the ring group and having people transfer pertinent calls to them.
In this case, setting up a couple of pickup groups and giving “the boss” access through inclusion in the pickup group without being included in the ring group makes for a very flexible and easy-to-implement system. Giving them a “pickup” button (which just dials *8) is a good way to simplify their life as well.