Am I missing something about voicemail?

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

I’ve recently put an Asterisk box into production for a small business of around 25 users. I compiled 1.2.10 and installed it onto an Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 machine.

For the most part, things have gone smoothly, but I’ve noticed that the voicemail system is extremely limited. It lacks the ability to send or forward a voicemail to multiple recipients, and this strikes me as one of the most basic operations a PBX can offer. I’ve scripted a work-around via some dialplan logic, (user dials an extension, it prompts them to enter as many mailboxes as they’d like, then executes Voicemail() on a dummy extension (which asks them to record their broadcast message and then deletes it from the dummy mailbox) and copies the message to all of the entered extensions), but this is rather inelegant, and it still has not solved my voicemail forwarding issue. Also, many of the users have expressed their desire to be able to do all of this from the voicemail menu, because they will dial into the system from an outside line, get to their voicemail, and will do the rest of their work from there. (Many of the employees are on the road frequently and access their voicemail from outside very often.)

I have no formal training in programming, so trying to edit app_voicemail.c has been unproductive thus far. But intuitively it strikes me that these edits should be extremely easy to make: all it would entail would be to allow anyone leaving a message, or forwarding one, to add additional mailboxes after the first one. Has this work already been done? If not, can someone point me in the right direction so I can see about doing it myself? It really seems like something this basic should be in the CVS by now.

2

hey spec,

this isn’t the forum for your topic of discussion, however, I’ve written some AGI scripts, a PHP web interface and done database work that may be up your alley. I’ve installed it on two customer sites for trial, and perhaps you’d be willing to give it a go.

One of my customers complained about similar limitations, especially to do with forwarding, the lack of a group mailbox, and for leaving an internal memo.

What I’ve created is a group mailbox, mobile notification, clean user interface, memo broadcast service to multiple recipients with the playback of the mailbox user for confirmation.

If you are interested, send me a private message with some contact info, I’ll get some documentation ready in the next week and send you the files and stuff.

I was hoping to release it properly in November but thems the breaks in software development land.