5.17. Delivering Voicemail Broadcasts

Problem

You want to broadcast inspirational messages to your entire staff with a single call. Or, you might have important information to deliver. At any rate, you want the ability to set up voicemail groups to receive voicemail broadcasts.

Solution

With Asterisk, it's easy. First, create a mailbox group in /etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf:

	;broadcast mailbox
	375 => 1234,StaffGroup

Then, create an extension in /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf that contains all the mail-boxes that belong to the group:

	;broadcast voicemail extension
	exten => 300,1,VoiceMail(375@local-vm-users&250@local-vm-users&251@local-vm
	users&252@local-vm-users)

Now, all you do is call extension 375, record your stirring communiqué, and it will copied to all the mailboxes in the group.

A useful option is to delete the master voicemail after it has been sent to the group, like this:

	375 => 1234,StaffGroup,,,delete=1

Discussion

Voicemail contexts have four fields:

	extension_number => voicemail_password,user_name,user_email_address,user_pager_email_
	address,user_options

The minimum needed to set up a voicemail box is extension_number => voicemail_ password, user_name. Any field that you skip needs a comma placeholder, as in this example that sends the user a copy of the voicemail attached to email:

	103 => 1234,John Gilpin,john@gilpinsride.com,,attach=yes

If you use more than one user option, separate them with a pipe symbol:

	103 => 1234,John Gilpin,john@gilpinsride.com,,attach=yes|delete=1

If your users want voicemails emailed to them, you'll want to use the compressed wav49 soundfile format. It's one-tenth the size of uncompressed WAVE files.

See Also