Is there a version of asterisk that allows users to create voicemail broadcast groups from their phone, save those lists and then send a voicemail to everyone on the list at the same time?
I have found a couple discussions on this subject, but the discussion seems to die right before the reporter adds a patch to the CVS. The discussions seem to date from a couple of years ago. could it be that this feature is available and I just don’t know how to use it? Or is there not enough interest to get this feature included?
This link is the discussion seems to outline exactly what I am talking about, but also seems to die right before the patch is rolled into the CVS.
There’s one catch - you can’t put more than about 253 characters in between the (), at least with Asterisk Business Edition. ABE B.1-4 is supposed to push that limit higher (hopefully way over 500 characters as I have a client that is waiting semi-patiently for that fix). I haven’t tried it in 1.2.13 so I’m not sure what the limit is there.
Is there a way that a user can create this dialplan from their phone. The voicemail system on our legacy PBX allows a user to create a list, save it and then use it to send voicemail. It also doesn’t waste an extension, because they do this all from their voicemail box. Shouldn’t there be some function within app_voicemail.c that would create a list, maybe save it as a text file in the users mailbox, then allow the user to call that list as a way to send voicemail?
That functionality isn’t available yet. There was a patch for 1.2.12 or so that move group functionality into the voicemail.conf and it worked pretty nicely but I have no idea if that will be moved into the main code. I would love them to do that as it would make group voicemail more viable (can’t forward group voicemails currently).
Using a variable to pass the group extension info to the VoiceMail application doesn’t work any better than passing the info by putting all of the extensions between the (). It only reads the first 253 characters or so of the variable.
How are you populating the variables? Is there a way to do that from the TUI? I think that a limited number of extensions is better than not being able to define groups and send voicemail to the group.