Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Chapter 11. Parking and Paging

I don’t believe in angels, no. But I do have a wee parking angel. It’s on my dashboard and you wind it up. The wings flap and it’s supposed to give you a parking space. It’s worked so far.

—Billy Connolly

This chapter will focus on two important aspects of a PBX system: parking calls to allow them to be answered from a location different from where they were originally answered, and paging, which allows the announcement of who the call is for and how it can be retrieved.

In Asterisk, these two functionalities are exclusive to one another, and can be used independently of one another. Some businesses that contain large warehouses, or have employees who move around the office a lot and don’t necessarily sit at a desk all day, utilize the paging and parking functionality of their systems to direct calls around the office. In this chapter we’ll show you how to use both parking and paging in the traditional setting, along with a couple of more modern takes on this commonly used functionality.

features.conf

There are several features common to most modern PBXs that Asterisk also provides. Many of these features have optional parameters. The features.conf file is where you can adjust or define the various feature parameters in Asterisk.

DTMF-Based Features

Many of the parameters in features.conf only apply when invoked on calls that have been bridged by the dialplan applications Dial() or Queue(), with one or more of the options K, k, H, h, T, t, W, w, X, or x