Hello,
I am in the process of replacing and old Toshiba Strata phone system with Asterisk and approx. 30 Polycom SoundPoint IP 501’s.
I am having trouble duplicating one function of our old Toshiba system, and that is: paging. Every member of our staff will not have a phone, we run a 24/7 lab so many engineers are out on the floor and don’t have an office cube. Of course, they still get phone calls from family or customers.
Here’s the issue. In the old Toshiba system, the call flow would be something like this:
[ul]
Caller dials in.
All the phones in the company ring.
End user picks up, places caller on hold.
End user presses 'intercom & page’
All phones in the company activate their speaker phone, and end user says “So and so please pickup line X”.
Desired person goes to nearest phone, hits the button for line 1 through 12.
[/ul]
In Asterisk, this exact setup won’t work. So here’s where I am so far:
[ul]
Caller dials in.
Caller utilizes either a queue or company directory to progress.
End user picks up, places caller on hold.
End user will press “Page”, which will activate an all call group which is routed to some Power-over-Ethernet SIP speakers we’re purchasing
…
[/ul]
This is my stumbling block. Do we forward the caller on hold to a specific phone? If so, which one if we don’t know where the call recipient is on the lab floor. Do we dump the caller into a MeetMe conference? That sounds good to me, but how does the recipient get into the conference with his caller?
Looking for some advice on this, please 