[Freeswitch-users] Park and Page use case

[Ian McMaster]

As this is my first question, please let me first praise the FreeSWITCH
team for a fantastic product and all the efforts of the community.  The two
books really helped convert all my Asterisk AGI / AMI java code to
FreeSWITCH.  All IVR play/record/dtmf, etc is working perfectly with
FreeSwitch now (and the IVR application is quite large).
I came to FreeSwitch after limitations/frustrations with Asterisk.  Happy
to be aboard, and hope to contribute in time.

Use case:  Controlling an IVR caller using the event socket; caller chooses
an option which will park the caller, and page out to a group of phones for
someone to pick up the parked caller.  If the park is answered the script
exits, or if the park times out then an alternate action is taken.

The valet_park command is working fine, and I can decipher through the
ChannelExecuteComplete event whether the park was retrieved or not.

I am struggling a bit with the paging to multiple polycom phones.

- using something like 'originate
{sip_auto_answer=true}user/1001,user/1002,...
 &playback(announce_page.PCMU) has limited success - my understanding is
that the first phone to answer 'wins' and the other phones do not receive
the playback.
- I have better success with conference
(a)  Invite phones into the conference: conference page_group dial
{sip_auto_answer=true}user/1001 ... etc
(b)  Play file:  conference page_group play announce_page.PCMU (although I
am having a codec problem here!)
(c)  End the conference:  conference page_group hup all
While the conference by nature has certain pre-stocked files (i.e. you are
the first caller, and music on hold, etc), I believe I can silence them all
with a custom conference.

My only show stopper is that if a page goes out to a phone with two line
buttons, and is already in use (on one line), then things go bad.  The
incoming conference request is knocking the existing call on hold, the page
is playing out, and the user must resume the call with a soft button.

Questions:
1)  Is there a better approach to paging multiple phones that I have yet to
try?
2)  Is there a way to avoid paging a phone that already has a caller on it?
3)  Is there conference variable to set the codec to allow the PCMU file to
play cleanly (it does play cleanly using originate without setting any
explicit codec).

Thank you in advance,
Ian.
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