[Asterisk-Users] Cisco Call Manager & Asterisk for Voicemail

[Paul Davidson]

In my particular environment, transfer directly into VM is not
important- we're geographically diverse, with almost no administrative
support- so you either answer your phone, or you forward your phone to
voicemail and let the voicemail do the work.

10 minutes with the debugger just yielded some very interesting
results, if you want to have all VM use a single number (so you don't
have to set up a separate extension for each VM box, and don't have to
do more than check 'on busy, forward to voicemail' on each extension. 
It only requires a slight modification to your instructions, can run
in parallel with your solution, and should be simple to test.  The
only drawback is that you lose the caller-id info of the original
caller.  Here's what you do:

Set up a new trunk, precisely as you've configured your existing
trunk- again, make sure it's two way, and verify that it works
properly.  To do this verification, set up a new route pattern, and
point it to your new trunk- calling the new route pattern should work
precisely as your other ones do.

Make one small modification to your new trunk.  Under the 'Outbound
Calls' section, 'Calling Party Selection', set it to 'First Redirect
Number'.  Yours is most likely set to 'Originator'.

Change your dialplan to add a new 'all voicemail' extension, that
matches the number on your new Route Pattern- there should be no need
for XXX's, just straight numbers all the way through- you want an
exact match every time. The dialplan (assuming your new extension is
1799, is as follows:

exten => 1799,1,NoOp
exten => 1799,2,MailBoxExists(${CALLERID}@default)
exten => 1799,3,Congestion
exten => 1799,103,Voicemail(su${CALLERID})
exten => 1799,104,Playback(vm-goodbye)
exten => 1799,105,Hangup

As I said- the caller's caller id info is lost in the process- Cisco
doesn't seem to send any redirection fields in the PDUs that I can
find, so you have to play with the caller info- but the rest should
work like a charm.

-pbd

On 5/26/05, Shaun Ewing <sewing at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/26/05, Paul Davidson <planac at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > You've done the hard bits.
> >
> > The bad news is that, under CCM, there's really not much in the way of
> > VM configuration.  You should set up the VM Pilot stuff to your
> > extension for the Asterisk voicemail- this allows you to click the
> > 'voicemail' box on each extension rather than keying it in- but you
> > still have to touch each extension.  You can use their automated tools
> > to make systemwide changes to all extensions- but I don't trust them
> > at all, and I don't think that would help you in this case.
> 
> Yep, I've setup a VM Pilot. I changed the default pilot, so the
> messages key works on all phones.
> 
> Phones without a mailbox, Asterisk prompts for mailbox and password.
> Phones with a mailbox, just the password.
> 
> > I'd love to see how you configured the MWI and how you've set your
> > dialplan- from the way it looks, you're using a different extension
> > for each mailbox.  Theoretically, there should be fields on the PDUs
> > from h.323 that show the forwarding number- that's the way Unity does
> > it- and you go into VM for the forwarding number, not for the
> > extension dialed.  I'm not sure without playing if any of the h323
> > channel drivers make the forwarding number available as a channel
> > variable- if they don't, it should be a relatively trivial patch,
> > assuming CCM sends it across (which I'm pretty sure it does- again,
> > time to set some debugs and watch the PDUs).
> 
> The notes basically show how MWI is configured.
> 
> I am actually using a different extension for each mailbox. This is
> something I setup a while ago to allow calls to be transferred direct
> to somebody's mailbox, and it has proven useful for this as well.
> 
> > -pbd
> 
> -Shaun
>