Practical Asterisk 1.4 and 1.6: From Beginner to Expert

12. Queues

A call queue lets you place callers on hold automatically if you don’t have someone available to answer the phone right away. (Most of us call this “being on hold.”) Many customers detest queues. Sadly, there is scarcely a business around these days that does not make use of them; perhaps they are better than the alternative, which is to not take the call at all. Whatever your opinion about them, they are part of communications reality, so we will describe the configuration and operation of queues in Asterisk here.¹

1. An example queue setup using AEL (Asterisk Extension Language) is described in doc/queues-with-callback-members.txt in Asterisk 1.4.

Four files are important for queues:

• queues.conf

Defines the queues.

• agents.conf ...