System wide Speed dials

[Brian]

One thing I just noticed thats missing is a way of creating system wide speed dials that most people use on pbx's

[Michael]

Although they're not obvious for this purpose, External Phones can do exactly that. They allow you to define an internal extension for a phone only reachable via a provider.

A quick way to define speed dials via the handset is still needed but this saves me a lot of keying. One thing to note, however, is that the External Phones are treated as internal phones giving the callee permission to transfer you to another extension. Perhaps this ability should be made an option in the future.

[Brian]

Any way of letting us import csv files for this rather than enter 70-80 entries?

[Michael]

Not at the moment. Would you be interested in a more specific and robust speed-dials interface? Anyone else have any comments on this?

[Brian]

I think a more specific bit would probably be easier - and much further down the line it might be nice to allow another user to log in and change things like this but not allowing them to configure any of the other components of the system which should be left for an admin.

In the mean time I can't seem to get the speed dialing to work - maybe its just me or this rubbish cisco 7940 phone i'm using just now - got another phone arriving today (fingers crossed).

[Brian]

External Phones

I can't get this to work - is there a problem with this feature at the moment?

[Michael]

Indeed.

I just made the appropriate changes and am doing some more testing. Thanks for reporting that, the next snapshot will have this fix.

[Tom Mazzotta]

The way I have seen this done effectively in another embeded asterisk distro it by making use of the asterisk database. It would make sense to implement this as a (combind) feature of the astmedia and phonebook packages since you would of course require persistent storage. The phonebook package already has the ability to upload a list of numbers via .csv, and even has a field for a speed dial number. The astmedia package could allow you to turn on the feature and configure a dial prefix, e.g., "11" which the dialplan would look for and use the following 2 digits of the dialed extension as a key to lookup the phone number to dial in the asterisk database. For example, dialling 1101 would do a DB_EXISTS(speeddial/01) and dial ${DB_RESULT} if the speed dial "01" where defined in the system.

I think this would be a powerful addition to an already impressive system.