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Below is an example of a macro that checks to see if the ‘holiday’ menu is enabled.  I also added extension 2970, a ‘one touch’ utility to enable/disable the holiday macro.  Remember to create a ‘holiday_disabled.wav’ that literally says, “Holiday menu disabled”.  To rercord a message simply disable and enable the utility again.  Enjoy!

This tutorial describes how to configure the idle display screens on Polycom phones to subscribe to a XHTML file that reads their Agent status from Asterisk.  When the phone is not in active use it displays the web page.

My tutorial has three components.  A specific Polycom option(found in sip.cfg) added to the configuration file of each phone, a BASH script I wrote, and a little Asterisk configuration.  This tutorial assumes you have a working Asterisk 1.6+ PBX with a basic queue setup.  It also assumes you are using automatic web provisioning of your Polycom phones.

Here is a link to my previous article on  configuring Polycom SoundPoint IP phones for Asterisk:

How to configure a Polycom SoundPoint IP phone for Asterisk on Fedora 10

To get the idle display screen to work correctly we will need to modify our standard configuration file a bit.  Navigate to the FTP/HTPP directory you provision your phones from.  Edit an Agent phone similar to the following,
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Queuemetrics is by far the best Call Center software Linux.  My only complaint might be that Java is huge resource hog when it parses the Asterisk. ‘/var/log/asterisk/queue_log’.  Luckily Loway provides an excellent PERL script called Qloader.

Today we will walk through installing Queuemeteics,MySQL,and Qloader daemon. My installation instructions are basically a quick rundown of the excellent infomation on Loways site:

http://queuemetrics.com/install.jsp
http://queuemetrics.com/manual_list.jsp 

My Setup:
Fedora 14 – (32 bit)
Asterisk 1.6
QEMU-KVM virtual machine on Intel i7

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This is a simple script for logging out Dynamic Agents in Asterisk.  The most common use would be to logout Agents automatically each day in case they forget or are on PAUSE.  Edit the “LOGGEDIN” variable below to match the correct length of digits.  By default it is three,  ’SIP/…’.

You can add as many or as few Queues in place of QUEUE1, QUEUE2, & QUEUE3.  This is the ‘foreach’ section of the script.  Whatever that is here will be applied to each instance of SIP/xxx detected by grep.  Good luck.

agent-auto-loggoff.script

————————————————————————–

#!/bin/bash

#set -x

# Execute from the command line, Asterisk or by cron

LOGGEDIN=$(/usr/sbin/asterisk -rx “queue show” | /bin/grep -o ‘SIP/…’)

for i in $LOGGEDIN

do

echo “$i removed”

#  Add in all queues that should be included
#==============

/usr/sbin/asterisk -rx “queue remove member $i from QUEUE1″
/usr/sbin/asterisk -rx “queue remove member $i from QUEUE2″
/usr/sbin/asterisk -rx “queue remove member $i from QUEUE3″

done

exit

A customer of VoiceIP Solutions sent me this useful tutorial for re-sampling Polycom Ringtones.   If you have an MP3 you like, it can be re-sampled for use with a Polycom IP SIP phone!  The procedure is pretty straight forward, Install Audacity with yum or your favorite package manager, re-sample the track, then edit the proper Polycom Soundpoint boot files.

Goals of this Post:

- Install Audacity Digital Audio Editor
- Convert a MP3 to Polycom compatible track
- Enable custom special Ringtone on Polycom Soundpoint IP SIP phone

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Recent versions of Asterisk 1.6 are compatible with the Asterisk 2.0 GUI.  This wasn’t always the case, as the Asterisk GUI was developed for the 1.4 branch.  Although I wish Digium had gone for the LAMP model, the GUI is pretty good and getting better all the time.  However the instructions to install are difficult to find on the asterisk.org website.  That is, if they are there at all.  My guess is that Digium doesn’t want to make it to easy to get a free GUI.  I think this a very poor strategy, but that’s another article….  Today we will run through a quick install of asterisk and the 2.0 GUI.  A far superior option as compared to to Trixbox and FreePBX.

GOALS OF THIS POST:
- Install Asterisk 1.6
- Install Asterisk 2.0 GUI

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The Digium Asterisk Appliance has built-in features for handling Polycom SIP handsets.  It’s very easy to do and will save you the trouble of individually configuring the settings of each phone.  I have a Digium AA50 configured with a standard dial plan and a Polycom Soundpoint IP 501.

Goals of this Post:

- Configure AA50 Polycom Provisioning
- Configure Polycom SoundPoint IP 501 phone

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Hello all. It’s been a few weeks since I posted… I’ve been teaching myself PHP to create a web interface for a Asterisk based project I’m working on. My goal is to create a LAMP(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web managment tool for creating calling cards for use with Asterisk. The project is called ACCWA(pronounced aqua), the Asterisk Calling Card Web Administration tool. As I put this altogether I will keep my loyal readers updated about what I’ve learned about PHP.

Today I will cover Arrays. PHP handles arrays in manner similar to PERL. Each value can have an optional indice. In my example below, we simply have a list with no idiceses.

example:

<?php

$myarray[]=”hi” ;
$myarray[]=”how” ;
$myarray[]=”are” ;
$myarray[]=”you?” ;

// Now we will ‘echo’ each value in the array
foreach ($myarray as $i) {
echo “$i ” ; }

?>

output of myarray.php:

Above we did two simple task. First we defined a list of words in our array, then we echo’ed each one individually with the ‘foreach’ function. Very similar to BASH.  Your PHP page should display:

hi how are you?

Correct time is crucial for many Network services.  Time stamps are required for accurate logs, email, and in the case of Asterisk – voicemail.  A customer sent me a request for instructions on adjusting date & time for their Asterisk PBX.  Most Fedora based systems come with a tool just for this purpose.  From the Desktop open a console window and type:

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A few weeks back I covered connecting ODBC to MS-SQL, but today we are going to do the same thing with MySQL.  The process is very similar.  One might ask, why use ODBC driver in the first place?  The reason is simple, there are many flavors of SQL and the ODBC driver allows one standard to connect them.  For that reason many software developers use ODBC for connecting their applications to SQL.

For my purposes, the Asterisk PBX platform can use ODBC to call ‘dial plan’ functions from the database, but that is another article!  This post assumes you have a working MySQL server and at least one table with data to pull from.

Goal of this Post:

- Install ODBC driver for MySQL
- configure odbc.ini
- configure odbcinst.ini
- verify connectivity with isql

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