[asterisk-users] Best practices to route calls according holidays

[Dale Noll]

On 05/18/2012 07:57 AM, Olivier wrote:
> Hi,
>
> At the moment, I'm mostly using a "Day/Night toggle" button to let
> users deal with week-ends, holidays and opening hours.
> As Asterisk 1.8 introduces Calendar capabilities, I'm wondering if
> better alternatives now exist.
>
> Is it possible, safe, reliable and easy to refer from Asterisk to a
> public calendar resource listing holidays, for a given country ?
> Should you instead refer to a private resource, to avoid depending on
> an externaly managed resource ? If you go this way, which tools would
> you recommend to build and update a private calendar ?
>

What we determined to work best for our organization was to have a 
database of holidays that we observe.  This allows several benefits.

We define which holidays actually cause the offices to be closed.

We can also define what time the office closes so half days for Good 
Friday and New Years Eve when we close at noon.

Some departments may not actually close the same hours as others so 
there are different calendars for different Queues and Auto Attendants.

If a holiday falls on a weekend, we may observe it on a different date 
so if Christmas falls on Saturday, we are closed on Friday. (We all do 
not close for Christmas Eve when this happens)

We have a special holiday called emergency that can be easily triggered 
remotely in the case of a major event, typically weather, that would 
force the offices to be closed.

All you need for this is a database, we use MySQL, and a way to query 
that database, we use func_odbc.  Management of the database can be 
command line, phpmyadmin or a custom front end.

Dale