[Asterisk-Users] Call Groups

[Philipp von Klitzing]

Hi!

The first hurdle you must take is finding out what "busy" exactly means 
for your SIP phones - do you allow only 1 call appearance, or 2, or ... 
see the dialplan commands "SetGroup", "GetGroupCount" etc. for this. 
Note: Before this feature was added to Asterisk people used 
"outgoinglimit=" and "incominglimit=" in sip.conf.

http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Asterisk%20cmd%20SetGroup

> I've looked around trying to find a solution to this problem but I 
> haven't found anything that works quite the way I want it to.  I know 
> you can use Dial(SIP/0&SIP/1&SIP/2,20,Ttr) to dial all three extension 
> at the same time but this won't work for me.  I also know that I could 
> set up a dial plan to go from one extension to the next but I only want 
> the phone to ring a max of 4 to 6 times.  Also, I imagine I could use 
> call queues but this is supposed to be a Reception phone and that 
> doesn't seem to fit here.

Why not simply use the queue if that solves your problem? You'll need to 
transalte "ring 4-6 times" into a value in seconds, but that you can 
manage I assume... :-)

Finally: If you "set up the dial plan to go from extension to extension" 
you'll get exactly what you want. Asterisk knows immediately if a phone 
is busy or not (limitations see above), so you are not wasting time (or x 
rings). If you like you can add a 'non-busy call attempt' counter using 
the "SetVar" dialplan command coupled with "GotoIf()" to prevent trying 
yet another extension...

Cheers, Philipp