[asterisk-users] Free sitting

[Gordon Henderson]

On Tue, 7 Aug 2007, Olivier wrote:

> So no proper logoff between logins, right ?
>
> As I will apply free sitting in school environment, chances are phones would
> then remain logged-in several hours or days between another user logs in.
>
> My thoughts are focused on finding the right balance between cost control
> and ease of use requirements.
>
> Maybe, we should program something like 3 states logins :
> - normal status : user receives call or can call cheap destinations
> - enhanced status : user can call expensive destinations
> - logged off status : no incoming calls
>
> Downgrading from enhanced to normal status is automatic : if a teacher is
> working during off hours, he will still receive incoming calls even after
> "being downgraded" to normal status.
>
> To elevate to enhanced status, you just have to enter your PIN code.
>
> What do you think of this ?
> has anyone tried something approaching ?

I implement somethng simlar which I call Follow-Me, or Hot Desking. 
(Although I think there are other definitions of Follow Me though!)

But it sounds like what you realy want are mobile/cell phones. Then it's 
less for the young people to fiddle with when no teacher is about...

Anyway, in my situation, everyone has an extension and to activate 
follow-me, they go to any phone in the system and dial in a star code, and 
their real extension and VM PIN, then all calls to their own extension are 
diverted to that extension. There are addtional star codes to cancel 
follow-me, from the phone they activated it at, from any phone, or their 
home phone. If they do a 2nd follow-me then the 1st one is "forgotten", so 
they could move from room to room and simple "logon" in each room.

My system is implemented entirely in dialplan code.

I guess it could be easy to record the time of logon and run some sort of 
cron job via the manager interface which un-did the follow-me at the end 
of every class (which I assume are at fixed intervals), so maybe even 
simply drop in a .call file to call a magic number which un-did the 
follow-me's (I record them in the astdb, so easy to delete - even with a 
cron job doing lots of asterisk -rx database del ... would be crude but 
effective)

Gordon