[asterisk-users] How to park calls on a specific extension

[Brad Templeton]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 06:05:31PM -0500, Steve Sobol wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Nov 2006, Brad Templeton wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Nov 27, 2006 at 11:20:27PM -0500, Andrew Joakimsen wrote:
> > > Can you explain how ValetParking and twenty minutes worth of "dialplan
> > > creativitiy" can't do the same EXACT thing you are describing? Sometimes the
> > > simplest answer is never the most obvious....
> > 
> > Yeah.  With valet parking (or any parking) you have to explicitly park
> > your call.   With what I propose, or with SLA, or with many key systems
> > or simple multiline phones, all you do is put the call on hold, and
> > that makes it possible to grab it from elsewhere.
> 
> Back on track...
> 
> OK. I understand that "press the hold button" won't do what I want.
> 
> The next best thing is ... instead of using the built-in call parking 
> feature, where the call gets parked at a random extension, I need to be 
> able to park calls from extension X at a specific other extension Y.
> 
> Parking at a random extension, then picking it up, is fine if there's ever
> only one call on hold, but I expect that there will be times where I need
> to have more than one call on hold. We have four DID lines, all plugged
> into our Asterisk server, and we do a lot of telephone support. :)
> 

You could pull this off in a small system because the parking lot is big
enough, I think with the valet parking add on.  You can create a parking
slot for each extension, and then grab them with a special extension.

So if your extensions are say 30 through 39 you could use the valet
add-on to always park extension 32 in slot 732, and then you could
always pick it up that way.

But I'm hoping that a better interface than lots can be devised with
time.   Lots are useful if you are a receptionist having to handle
tons of calls, put more than one call on hold at once and pick them
up in different unpredicted places.  But otherwise their UI is not
particularly good for ease of use.

The best interface, I think, is either hold implicitly becomes pickupable
after 5 seconds, or if you want a transfer, to have a parking lot you
blind xfer to because you don't need to listen to the slot number, you
just press a single button called park if possible.

Let's face it, PBXs are notorious, even with new fancy screen phones,
at being hard to use, and the UIs not remembered by their users, and
also varying from phone to phone.   There's much room for improvement
in all PBX interfaces.  Not just Asterisk.

To my mind every PBX might do well just to have a single function button
on the phone which causes a dialog box to pop up on the PC next to the
phone, and do it all through that (though possibly by pushing buttons
on the phone in most cases instead of the keyboard if you like.)

A UI with clear buttons, grayed out buttons for what you can't do,
help screens, warnings where appropriate, etc.

SIP didn't go that way, it went towards the phone being full of features
itself.