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Tag: Asterisk PBX

FAQ – Frequent Asterisk Questions – #4

Post Views: 5,157 Introduction I’m a contributor at StackOverflow, answering questions concerning the Asterisk PBX system.  These types of questions, at their core, are part of my bread-and-butter work.  I’ve been working with Asterisk since 2004 and have personally deployed it successfully in 10 different countries under a wide variety of circumstances and use-cases. Q: I have weekly conference calls for staff.  Can Asterisk call the conference participants and add them automatically at the start of the meeting? For this to work, we need to solve a puzzle in three parts.  One of those things I tell my customers all the time is that if they can dream it up, we can get Asterisk to do it for them.  This is a classic example of what I mean. First, you need to…

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FAQ – Frequent Asterisk Questions – #3

Post Views: 424,848 Introduction I’m a contributor at StackOverflow, answering questions concerning the Asterisk PBX system.  These types of questions, at their core, are part of my bread-and-butter work.  I’ve been working with Asterisk since 2004 and have personally deployed it successfully in 10 different countries under a wide variety of circumstances and use-cases. Q: What Guidelines  should I follow to set up an IVR with Asterisk? IVR design in Asterisk is not difficult, but there is a bit of a “learning cliff” associated with getting your first Asterisk server up and running.  Once you are that far, then you can consider taking on an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. I cannot stress enough that call quality is everything. Pay to have professional grade recordings done for your IVR prompts and your announcements.…

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FAQ – Frequent Asterisk Questions – #2

Post Views: 329 Introduction I’m a contributor at StackOverflow, answering questions concerning the Asterisk PBX system.  These types of questions, at their core, are part of my bread-and-butter work.  I’ve been working with Asterisk since 2004 and have personally deployed it successfully in 10 different countries under a wide variety of circumstances and use-cases. However, there are a few things that are just “nice to have” in the tool-kit for a starting AST PBX admin.  So, I’m going to post a few of them on my blog.  It’s paying forward for a lot of the help I’ve gotten over the years. Q: Can I “rimshot” a call to my mobile phone? Yes. This is very straight forward.  We do it for some of our customers on our Cloudphones platform, in fact.  A…

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FAQ – Frequent Asterisk Questions – #1

Post Views: 304 Introduction I’m a contributor at StackOverflow, answering questions concerning the Asterisk PBX system.  These types of questions, at their core, are part of my bread-and-butter work.  I’ve been working with Asterisk since 2004 and have personally deployed it successfully in 10 different countries under a wide variety of circumstances and use-cases. However, there are a few things that are just “nice to have” in the tool-kit for a starting AST PBX admin.  So, I’m going to post a few of them on my blog.  It’s paying forward for a lot of the help I’ve gotten over the years. Keep A Call Alive Past Hangup A common requirement is to do something after the call ends.  Maybe run an AGI program to update a database for billing, or marketing. The…

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Quick Hacks: Asterisk account codes, Ruby programming, and the Freshbooks API

Post Views: 698 I put together a quick hack last night that will help with managing truant accounts on JKL5’s “Cloudphones” SMB VoIP PBX. Ostensibly, it’s a pre-paid service for small to medium businesses, as well as a couple of residential customers. However, we have a couple of problem accounts that require checking on the accounts payable report followed by a few nagging emails to get to pay their bills at the 45 day mark. In each trunk and phone configuration, I have the customer’s company name set as the “Account Code” for any call they take or make. In an IAX2 trunk, it looks like this: [example_incoming_trunk] type=user host=iax04.unlimitel.ca username=1112223333 context=call_router requirecalltoken=yes accountcode=jkl5group [example_outgoing_trunk] type=peer host=edge01.my_itsp.com secret=some9797numbers username=1112223333 accountcode=jkl5group With something like a SIP phone, it’s just as easy:…

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Clever Call Recording With Asterisk PBX

Post Views: 2,783 In addition to being an author, I’m also a telecom/ linux geek.  Someone recently posted on “StackOverflow” that they couldn’t find a good “how-to” on call recording for Asterisk PBX systems. I’m not convinced they looked too hard, but I figured it would not take me too long to post one up.  This works with both Asterisk 1.4.x and Asterisk 1.8.x.  YMMV on other revs. Please note that this post is written for someone that has a basic understanding of Asterisk call routing and dial plans.  If you don’t have that, I strongly recommend you take a read of: https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Creating+Dialplan+Extensions http://www.asterisk.org/doxygen/trunk/Config_ext.html http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+config+extensions.conf So, let’s get started: Add a line like this to your outbound dial route and your inbound dial route: same => n, Macro(do_call_recording|${MACRO_CONTEXT}|${CRS_ID}|Outbound)…

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Recovery In Progress

Post Views: 382 Well, my day went sideways this morning… a customer called at 8am to tell me his office had a fire and his server closet with his firewall and PBX got sprinklered to death. I’m getting a disaster system set up for them on one of my Cloudphones PBXs and then spending the afternoon mapping out next steps. This is going to be one of those times where 20/20 says that if the customer had prepped the disaster recovery plan in advance, he’d be sweating a whole lot less right now.

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