I have just installed a new system (AsteriskNOW 1.7.1, Asterisk 1.6.2.11, FreePBX 2.7.0.6).
One task was to get the phones to stay quiet on incoming calls - only an old bell on the wall should ring. Getting the bell to ring was solved by connecting it to an ATA, so the bell now has it’s own extension number (51).
My plan was to pass the incoming calls through an IVR, and after a 5 second timeout into a queue. 51 is the only “agent” in the queue. When a call comes in, the bell rings just fine. But when I type **51 on a phone (a Snom 320 in this case), I just got an error message (declined as far as I remember).
I replaced the queue with a ring group. Still with 51 as the only member. Now I am able to pickup the call by typing **51. Why the difference?
But what happens when more than two calls arrive at the same time? Won’t call number 3+ get passed to voicemail? Isn’t a queue needed to handle more than two concurrent calls?
I went back to the queue. I put the bell in callgroup 1, and all the phones in pickupgroup 1. That seems to work fine so far…
Using alert-info would be more elegant, but with a mixture of phones (Snom, Aastra and Cisco ATAs) I don’t think it will work. They all need different strings in alert-info as far as I can find out.
That should work…but you may have to do a bit of research on getting distinctive ringing to work on a Snom. I think I’ve seen several posts on this forum about getting alert to work on a snom.
Create a ring group and use the alert-info to use a silent ringer on your phones. Your ATA will ignore this setting (caveat if you have Linksys phones and ATA) and the phone’s won’t ring.
Yes. Rather than having 10 phones ring at the same time, only the bell should ring. The phones should of course still ring, when they receive a direct call.
As I understand it (perhaps wrongly), *8 will pickup any call - not just external ones. So if extension 25 is calling extension 20 at the same time as an external call comes in, typing *8 at extension 23 may pickup the internal call rather than the external call. Is that not the case?
Why don’t you go back to the queue and instead of directed call pickup, place the phones that will answer the bell in the same ring group with the bell. Then any phone in the ring group can answer by punching *8#.