[asterisk-users] Dial your phone and contact phone from within outlook?

[A J Stiles]

On Wednesday 02 Mar 2016, Ryan, Travis wrote:
> I am wondering what the best solution is for initiating a call from Outlook
> Contacts. I imagine something that would start the call from the outlook
> card (or similar) and then dial the user's extension and the contact's
> phone number and place them in a bridge.
> 
> Anyone use something like this?

I'm not familiar with Outlook; but I imagine it must have the ability to run 
external helper programs, substituting placeholders in the command line with 
fields from the contact's database record, to perform actions such as dialling 
numbers.

Here, we use Kontact  (part of KDE)  which definitely has such an ability.  So 
I configured it to use wget to fire off a request to a CGI script which generates 
a call file; then you just click to dial a contact's number, your phone begins 
to ring, you answer it and the remote contact's phone begins to ring.

The backend script is fairly simple.  We can determine the extension number 
nearest to the user from their IP address  (the DHCP server is configured 
always to offer the same IP address to the same hardware address, so 
workstations effectively have static IP addresses),  which will be passed to 
the script by the Apache server.

If you can fire off a wget request when clicking on a number, you should be good 
to go.  (You can request a non-existent script at first; the request will show 
up in /var/log/apache2/error.log .)  If you need help with the script, ask 
again  :)

-- 
AJS

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