[Asterisk-Users] sharing a line w/multiple extensions

[Robert La Ferla]

Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
> Robert La Ferla wrote:
>
>> phones.  When someone picks up (don't know how I can detect this), it 
>> could transfer both parties to a meetme room.  When additional 
>> extensions pickup, they go to the meetme room.  When everyone hangs 
>> up, the call ends.  Can this be done?
>
> Probably, but it would take some very creative dialplan programming 
> and an external application to transfer the parties into a meetme 
> room. You will not get 'pickup' behavior on the SIP phones regardless, 
> they will have to press a speed dial button which would attempt to 
> join the meetme.
>
> In other words: you can get there, but it will _not_ behave like a key 
> system, and people will expect it to, so they will be frustrated when 
> it doesn't. We've been down this road many times before, and many 
> Asterisk installations have been taken out because the installers 
> thought they could achieve key system behavior (or retrain the users) 
> but failed. If you want to try, feel free... I'm only telling you what 
> has happened before :-)
Thanks.  That's very helpful because being new to Asterisk, I don't know 
the history of what people have attempted to use Asterisk for.  It's 
unfortunate that there's no way to do it because it sounds like others 
are looking for this same functionality.  I wonder what it would take to 
implement this in Asterisk natively.  Does Digium take feature 
requests?  Certainly, this would have appeal for residential systems.