[asterisk-users] Followme for multiple persons?

[JD]

I've got a challenge (or clarification request if I am mistaken) for the 
group.

I have a non-profit customer on asterisk 1.4 that has multiple 
volunteers that work from home. The volunteers are willing to take calls 
to help out the organization.

So, a formal queue is out. They don't want their home phones or cell 
phones to blindly send them callers. They want to take calls when/if 
they happen to be free to take a call at that particular moment. Plus, 
the queue function can't handle the "roll to voicemail" problem that all 
cell phones have. Plus, they won't have the discipline to log-in/log-out.

Fine, I thought, I'll just use the followme function in Asterisk 1.4. It 
rings four numbers at once. It asks the friendly screening question, 
allowing a volunteer to press 1 to take the call. Or, they hang up and 
perhaps someone else will take it. (Or, if nobody does, it goes to 
voicemail.)

Fine and dandy. Or so I thought. The problem is that followme is 
designed to assume that it is only going to reach exactly one person. 
So, if a phone answers and they press "2" to reject the call: bam, 
asterisk stops trying the other three phone numbers.

I am currently trying to educate the volunteers to "refrain from 
pressing 2" but that is prone to problems. I'd rather that there not be 
a reject function at all. Or, making it so that pressing 2 doesn't 
really reject the call, it just hangs it up. I could change the audio, 
and remap 2 to 9 and hope nobody presses it, but that seems like an 
accident waiting to happen.

Does anyone have suggestions?

John