You're a mobile kind of worker. Sometimes you get a question that you have to go to a different room to answer, which means your caller is sitting on hold for a long time. Wouldn't it be nice if you could transfer the call and pick it up at your new location?
Yes, it would, and you can. Asterisk has 20 reserved
parking slots, 701–720. Activate parking by
adding the parkedcalls context to
your desired internal context, such as the [local-users] context used in this
chapter:
[local-users] include => parkedcalls
Make sure you have mighty transfer powers with the t option:
exten => 252,1,Dial(SIP/dutchs,10,t)
Enabling parked calls requires a server restart:
asterisk1*CLI> restart gracefullyTest it by calling your extension. An easy way to do this is to have a second soft-phone on your test PC configured with a different user account. Cell phones are also great for testing Asterisk.
Transfer the call to extension 700, and Asterisk will automatically park it in the first empty slot. It will tell you the number of the parked extension—to resume the call, pick up another extension, and dial the parked extension number.
If it times out, it will ring the extension originally called, where it will be treated like any call, and go to voicemail if it's not answered.
The lowercase t option allows
only the person receiving the call to transfer it. This means you can
park a call only once. If you add an uppercase T, like this:
exten => 252,1,Dial(SIP/dutchs,10,tT)
then you can make transfers whether you're on the receiving or the calling end. So, when you un-park a call, you can park and transfer it yet again.
Call parking is configured in
/etc/asterisk/features.conf. While there are a
number of configurable options, the only one that really matters to
most folks is the parking time
option, which sets the timeout value.
The default is 45 seconds, which means if you don't pick up within 45 seconds, the call will ring back to your original extension.