Monitor and intercept calls from a queue

[justin.massiot]

Hello,

I have a set of SPA504G phones in my company. The main (external) contact phone number of our office goes to a queue which rings some selected phones (i.e. extensions).

I want to allow employees that are not in the queue to monitor (silently) and pickup the incoming call waiting in the queue with a spare line key. If I configure a BLF to monitor the queue it gives me a steady amber LED (does not work). Is it possible to monitor a queue with a BLF? (Is it more an IPBX-side configuration problem?) If it's not possible, are there some workarounds? Monitoring -BLF- one of the extensions targetted by the queue does not sound good to me because the call list of the queue could be updated.

Note: The IPBX is Elastix (FreePBX / Asterisk).

Thanks for the help.

[Dan Lukes · Accepted solution]

Well. The so called "monitoring" mean the phone subscribes to the state of entity. The entity is identified by the name supplied in subscribe request.

The entity need not to be casual line/extension only. Phone neither know nor care the kind of entity.

You can monitor day/night mode of PBX, you may monitor the state of DND line flag, for example we monitor the unconditional forward is active on particular line - in short - you can monitor state of anything your PBX is willing to provide as long as you know particular entity name your PBX use for it.

It apply to queue as well.

I'm not familiar with Elastix enough to advice you the name of entity in question. I even don't know the Elastix provide required information at all. Consult the product documentation or ask product support or a forum dedicated to Elastix. Once you become aware of the name - just configure it on your SPA504G.

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Also note the monitoring (BLF) and call pickup are independent features. You need to identify what number needs to be dialed to pick up call from queue (assuming something like it is possible on Elastix at all). The code (number to dial)  triggering call pickup may or may not be the same as name of entity used for monitoring (BLF). So same advice - read product documentation and/or ask on Elastix related support/forum.

[justin.massiot]

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your great help.

I know that BLF and CP are two different things, but for the moment none of them work for me :-) When somebody calls 1150 (the queue), if I dial **1150 it fails to make a "directed call pick-up", whereas the procedure works well for any other extension. The BLF LED stays in fix orange.

I will search deeper to see if there are some special tricks to apply on my IPBX.

[Dan Lukes]

As far as I know, the Asterisk support neither call pickup from queue nor publish empty/non empty state via device state API.

You claimed the Elastix is Asterisk based thus I assume it doesn't support it as well.

[justin.massiot]

Thanks Dan, I understand that it isn't a problem related to the phones but to the IPBX. I will do further researches to see if I can do what I want. There is a patch that could do the job, I didn't test it yet.

[justin.massiot]

As it seemed to be very complicated to do like I would initially, I changed my mind.

I replaced the "queue" by a "ring group" because it was really more appropriate to our needs. In the ring group I added a "general phone". Nobody is supposed to call it, it should only be rung by the "general call" group. On other phones I am now able to subscribe to monitor the state of Line 1 as BLF: this gives an indication of a general call.

I know this is not a nice solution at all, but it does the trick.