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The subject doesn’t really describe the problem good enough. So here it is… basically you have agents (whether you are using AgentCallBackLogin, or a setup like my alternative.)  The problem was that if the Agent transferred the call to another agent, Asterisk qould still show the agent has ‘busy.’ If you listed channels, it would even show the first Agent involved in the call. Keep in mind, which seemed to know be a problem if it was an attended transfer. (Or for us of us, we like to use the ‘xfer’ botton on our IP Phones… it was a problem then too.)  Well, it’s no longer a problem. You can find the solution below… Read more »

You have two offices, each with their own Asterisk Server. And you want to be able to call between the two. How do you do this? How do you set this up with SIP? A few people have requested this article. Well, here it is. Read more »

In a previous post, I mentioned that I came up with a solution for the disadvantages to the LookupBlackList Application. This could also be viewed as an alternative solution, seeing how the LookupBlackList has been depreciated, and set to be removed for a future release of Asterisk. Let’s not waste any time. Let’s get right into it.
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At times we get those annoying callers. They usually end up being a waste of our time and resources. So what can you do? You can block them from calling in. Asterisk has an application in place to make this an easy task. It’s called: LookupBlackList()
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In a previous article, I showed an alternative method of AgentCallBackLogin. In that example, the agents were authenticated via voicemail.conf. I made a comment that I would create a dialplan with it authenticating against a MySQL database.

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In my previous article, I made mention of using the CDR Database to generate reports. Unless you have the time, resources, and skills to develop some killer apps, you might begin looking at 3rd party applications to make your reports “pretty” and presentation worthy.

OrderlyQ has put together some rather great software. Read more »

So in my previous article, I said I would provide some sample scripts to view information from our CDR database. My script is written in PHP, and we’re just going to do a quick query of the database for answered calls. Read more »

Okay, so you have got your asterisk box online. You have all the configuration done according to your needs. And now you are starting to develop applications to generate graphs and reports based on your call volume and flow. You’ll probably want to have your CDR logs entered into a database for easier management. Read more »

Compared to my other articles, this one is a bit more indepth. I’m sorry for that. I just finally found a workaround to a world of pain. If you are a user of the AgentCallBackLogin dialplan application, then you are probably aware that it’s set to be depreciated come version 1.6 of Asterisk. This is a major shame, as it’s a useful application especially to call centers. The guys are Digium said that everything can be done from the dialplan. And while that is true, they fail to give us any “guidance” in getting this setup. There was a doc located in /doc/queues-with-callback-members.txt – But in order to use this guide, you basically have to move to a new way of writing your extensions, that is via extensions.ael. AEL is great, and makes things easy to keep organized. But let’s face it, we hate too much change at once. So I’ve done ALOT of research into the alternative for AgentCallBackLogin, and how to do it, with very little pain.

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By default, you rely heavily on Asterisk .conf file for creating your dialplans, iax and sip users and peers, as well as voicemail users. And after making changes to the configuration files, you have to reload Asterisk to apply them. However, the guys at Asterisk have made it easier. With Asterisk Realtime, you can add new users and modify your dialplans on the fly. Everything is neatly stored in a database, and loaded on the fly. So in this article, we will discuss how to get started so that you can make use of Asterisk Realtime.
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