[asterisk-users] Opinion on Attended transfer in features.conf

[Benny Amorsen]

John Novack <jnovack at stromberg-carlson.org> writes:

> I have wondered for years now why someone thought there needed to be two 
> different transfer functions.
> Transfer should be ONE function. If one wants to speak first to the 
> object of the transfer, then stay until they answer, otherwise hang up 
> and the transfer is completed.
> Two independent transfers that have to start with different codes is 
> just awkward and dumb and long ago needed to be fixed.
> I suppose it started life because someone had a weak knowledge of basic 
> telephony, but I really don't know.
> Learn from history and improve on it.
> When one reinvents the wheel, sometimes one ends up with an ellipse.

You can choose to do it that way. If you teach all your users to use
transfer that way, and your phone has a transfer-on-hangup setting, then
it will all work fine. However, there are quite a few interesting
scenarios which won't work with such a simplistic setup.

Imagine this:

An employee wants to transfer a call to a different employee. She dials,
and gets the busy signal because the other employee is already handling
a call. The original caller says that he wants to wait until the
employee is available, so she does a blind transfer to the employee.
Asterisk detects this blind transfer and puts the caller into a Queue or
RetryDial instead of just sending a busy signal.

This is only possible because blind and attended transfer are different.

By the way, do any of you use RetryDial?


/Benny