asterisk users - May 2006 - Switchboard solutions, interactions with handset

Hi there,

I'm looking into developing an in-house switchboard application. Does
anyone here know of a way to control a hard-phone from such an
application.

For example, the attendant forwards a call with another one in queue.
Once the first call has been forwarded (by keyboard shortcuts or
dragging-n-dropping) - she presses a button (on the computer) to
answer the waiting call.

Now, if the switchboard application embeds a soft-phone, I can figure
out how to do this. But suppose the attendant is using a hard-phone
(since it's more reliable) with a headset - can she do the above
things without having to press any of the phones buttons?

Wouldn't this require the application to somehow control if the phone
is off-hook or on-hook? Is there some other way I'm not seeing and/or
has someone here implemented similar stuff?

Could I possibly keep an open channel in Asterisk to the attendants
phone, and bridge that with whatever channel requested by the
switchboard application? I have found some mention of this, bridging
channels, in the mailing list archives, but not in the AMI
documentation. Is this maybe something that's still only on the svn
trunk?

thanks,
Arnar

On 5/4/06, Arnar Birgisson <kvos.asterisk@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I'm looking into developing an in-house switchboard application. Does
> anyone here know of a way to control a hard-phone from such an
> application.
>
> For example, the attendant forwards a call with another one in queue.
> Once the first call has been forwarded (by keyboard shortcuts or
> dragging-n-dropping) - she presses a button (on the computer) to
> answer the waiting call.
>
> Now, if the switchboard application embeds a soft-phone, I can figure
> out how to do this. But suppose the attendant is using a hard-phone
> (since it's more reliable) with a headset - can she do the above
> things without having to press any of the phones buttons?
>
> Wouldn't this require the application to somehow control if the phone
> is off-hook or on-hook? Is there some other way I'm not seeing and/or
> has someone here implemented similar stuff?
>
> Could I possibly keep an open channel in Asterisk to the attendants
> phone, and bridge that with whatever channel requested by the
> switchboard application? I have found some mention of this, bridging
> channels, in the mailing list archives, but not in the AMI
> documentation. Is this maybe something that's still only on the svn
> trunk?
I have done something similar using a modified Flash Operator Panel
and a phone with autoanswer capabilities (polycom 501), while the
operator is using a headset. Then you can use standard manager actions
to redirect calls to the operator. Regards,

--
Nicol?s Gudi?o
Buenos Aires - Argentina