Secretary/Support Phone Setup

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

I’d like to reverse-engineer the line configuration I enjoyed at IBM.

IBM used a proprietary VOIP-analog hybrid solution and I had Rolm phones on my desk and a secretary capable of answering my lines.

My phones:
"." is the little red light
. 5723 - Rollover 2
. 5701 - Rollover 1
. 1000 - (203)555-1000

Secretary's Phone
. 5723 - Rollover 2 (1000)
. 5701 - Rollover 1 (1000)
. 1000 - (203)555-1000
. 5424 - Rollover 1 (1923)
. 1923 - (203)555-1923

I had 2 phones with the “same” lines and the Secretary’s phone also had my lines.

Pressing a line button immediately picked-up on that line unless the other party pressed the button for “privacy.” A 2nd touch toggled from “private” back to normal.

How would this work on Asterisk?
I have researched “how to simultaneously ring two lines.”
I realize the labels on the phones were strictly for the “end user” with the actual lines all possibly having different extension numbers.
I am just looking to improve my understanding and follow some “best practices” in reproducing this setup.
I would like to keep this discussion as client-agnostic as possible.

Thank you very much, in advance!

Aside: Just to share; when I 1st installed Asterisk (maybe 20+ years ago) my goal was to get those Rolm phones I loved. Sadly, I discovered the tan Rolm phones only worked on the very proprietary VOIP/analog hybrid Rolm PBX. I’d have been in heaven if those Rolm phones had been standard VOIP. I loved all the end-user programmable buttons.

2

There are a two ways how you can have multiple endpoints ring simultaneously using the same “extension”.

  1. Multiple PJSIP contacts
  2. A Local channel calling two endpoints.

I’m terms of having the secretary answering your calls, this can easily be done with a BLF indicator and call pickup.

Finally, to toggle the privacy feature, you can set/unset a DB value that would enable/disable call pickup, or even the BLF monitoring all together.

3

Multiple PJSIP contacts are converted into the same basic notation as has always allowed dialling multiple destinations in parallel, before the Dial application is invoked. There is also no need to use a local channel when calling multiple non-PJSIP destinations.

1 Like
4

Thank you, both!

I ran with parallel dialing and it works, as expected.

With regards to setting a db value for privacy–does that require a db back-end?

5

AstDB is built-in.