Problem with Transfer to Voicemail, Park and Visibility

photo_ted

I am working off Asterisk 1.6 (latest Elastix distro) and FOP 2.11.

From FOP2 I can:
[list:2pn2a59w]Pick up calls
Transfer calls to extensions
Transfer calls to queues
Transfer calls to a conference room
[/list:u:2pn2a59w]

From FOP2 I cannot:
[list:2pn2a59w]Transfer to a user's voicemail directly (the call is hung up)
Transfer to parking (hang up)[/list:u:2pn2a59w]

The transfer to parking lot works from a SIP/soft phone; I don't know how to the transfer directly to a user's voicemail from the phone so I cannot confirm it that works.

Finally, when I park a call from a SIP or softphone, if I blind transfer it, the call is visible in the Parking Lot button, if I call with consultation (which I need to do to know where it is parked), the call appears in the Parking Lot while "consulting" with the parking lot attendant, but disappears as soon as I complete the transfer.

I've reviewed my configuration against Nicholas' documentation and the Elastix documentation.

Any ideas what is going on and how to fix these?

Tx,
Ted

nicolas

Hello,

Transfer to voicemail works if you have defined an extension to transfer to voicemail to in your dialplan, in freepbx that extension is predefined to be *EXTEN. If you do not use freepbx you have to create a special extension or context to transfer calls directly to voicemail.

Regarding Parking, the issues you describe are because of the way asterisk handles transfer and parking. The manager reports a channel as being destroyed when you do an attendant transfer to the parking lot. FOP2 is just honoring the AMI events. If I try to fix or make special workaround for that I will probably introduce some unwanted effects that are probably more annoying, like stuck channels in the parking lot.

So, for parking to work you need to use blind transfers.

photo_ted

Nicolas,

Thanks for the response.

WRT direct transfer to voicemail, I believe I found a bug in autoconfig-buttons-freepbx.sh. It refers to "extenvoicemail". Your documentation and the panel code refers to "voicemailext". When I changed all occurrences in autoconfig-buttons-freepbx.sh (five I think) of "extenvoicemail" to "voicemailext" the transfer to voice mail button started to work.

And those pesky assisted transfers in Asterisk. I've spent a month developing a solution that allows the people being called to see the caller id information of the call currently on hold by the person transferring. Eventually I made the assumption that the last call put on hold is the call that will be transferred and store the channel name in a map (Java) keyed on the extension. When the call is first made (by reception) to the recipient my process looks up the callers extension (you pass it to me in checkdir.php) in that map and presents the underlying caller id information as part of the web call (to a tomcat server). It works nicely.

While doing that work I discovered that Asterisk 1.6 does have a Transfer Event that allows you to know what is happening at time of transfer. I suspect you could use this information to successfully identify what is in the parking lot. In my development I have been keeping the channel name around and when I see a hangup event I use that value to clear out the various maps and lists I have used to track the call to keep from leaking memory.

Agreed that a blind transfer to the parking lot does work, although I like that the person putting the call into park gets the message through the phone of the parking lot number. Without it the user must use FOP to know where it went.

Ted

photo_ted

I figured out the problem with calls being dropped when transferring to Park. For some reason I did not have your copy of extensions_override_freepbx.conf in /etc/asterisk. The version I had was missing the fop2-park context. I copied your file (from /usr/local/fop2) to /etc/asterisk and bingo it worked.

If anyone else has a similar problem, go to /etc/asterisk and enter the command

grep fop2-park *

If nothing is found, you have the same problem I did.

Ted