Tim, Thanks for replying. I'm in contact with someone who has a fairly complete voicemail implementation written in LUA. Hopefully we can work out an arrangement to open source that code so we can all work on it and adapt it for our needs. If everything goes as planned I'd love to have you help out. On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 9:10 AM, Tim St. Pierre <fs-list@communicatefreely.net> wrote:

 So, what are your thoughts?

...

I think I would be interested in helping if I can, as I'm more or less in the same boat, with an existing user base on Asterisk.  I would like to make things a little bit more configurable (not that they aren't already).

I don't have any experience working with C, but I am getting to know LUA, PHP, SQL, and a few others. I'm hoping I can do something helpful.

I have moved a lot of logic outside of the application and into a lua script to do what I want. Here's some of the features I have added.  Let me know if this is something we could roll into a new module.

-Configurable cause code to greeting mappings

This lets you define an alternate greeting that will play if your phone is busy, in do not disturb, not registered, etc.  It gives similar functionality to the busy/unavail greetings in Asterisk, but with a lot more flexibility.  I also defined a mapping for "vm-direct", as on our PBX, you can transfer a call to **EXTEN to go straight to voicemail.  On a NO_ANSWER cause, the selected greeting is played, which allows for vacation messages.  If the mappings are set in the database, but the alternate greeting hasn't been recorded, it will use the selected main greeting, or play "the person at extension ... is unavailable".

-Configurable 0 IVR routing

I have put a bit more functionality in the 0 routing.  In our Asterisk implementation, we had 0 go to reception, and # go to the users cell phone.  A lot of people use this.  There isn't a good way to do this in Freeswitch, so we came up with a different option.  In the VM config database that we use, I have an IVR enable flag, as well as an extension slot for digits 0-9.  If the IVR is disabled, pressing 0 transfers to the extension in the 0 slot.  If the IVR is enabled, it uses greeting 9 as the menu, and will let the caller choose an option, transferring them to the extension set in the database.  This lets a user do something like this:

"You have reached Tim, but I'm away from my desk at the moment.  Please leave a message after the tone or press 0 for immediate assistance". ->"For technical support, press 1.  To reach my assistant, press 2.  If you would like to try my cell phone, press 3".

I would also like to see: An option NOT to delete the voice message when you e-mail it from the vm menu. A mechanism to record your name that the dial by name directory module can use. An option to skip the message details before you play them.

I'm sure there are others.

Let me know if you think any of these options are useful.

_______________________________________________ FreeSWITCH-users mailing list FreeSWITCH-users@lists.freeswitch.org http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/freeswitch-users UNSUBSCRIBE:http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/options/freeswitch-users http://www.freeswitch.org

-- Kristian Kielhofner http://www.astlinux.org http://blog.krisk.org http://www.star2star.com http://www.submityoursip.com http://www.voalte.com

Voicemail is of high interest to us too. We have a few ideas about improvements to mod_voicemail. I have entered a couple JIRA requests so you could look there for some more ideas for improvements to make. http://jira.freeswitch.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&mode=hide&p id=10021&sorter/order=DESC&sorter/field=priority&resolution=-1&component=100 77 I have submitted a patch to add a per user operator extension. I have a patch to add main menu access from other menus. There are open requests to fix the repeated “Saved” message and to reset the greeting back to the default. Please feel free to contact me off list for more ideas. Also, I know C pretty good :) Thanks, Robert -----Original Message----- From: Kristian Kielhofner [mailto:kris@kriskinc.com] Sent: Tuesday, August 24, 2010 9:00 AM To: FreeSWITCH Users Help Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] New Bounty (again): Improved Mod_voicemailEmulation Tim, Thanks for replying. I'm in contact with someone who has a fairly complete voicemail implementation written in LUA. Hopefully we can work out an arrangement to open source that code so we can all work on it and adapt it for our needs. If everything goes as planned I'd love to have you help out. On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 9:10 AM, Tim St. Pierre <fs-list@communicatefreely.net> wrote:

 So, what are your thoughts?

...

I think I would be interested in helping if I can, as I'm more or less in the same boat, with an existing user base on Asterisk.  I would like to make things a little bit more configurable (not that they aren't already).

I don't have any experience working with C, but I am getting to know LUA, PHP, SQL, and a few others. I'm hoping I can do something helpful.

I have moved a lot of logic outside of the application and into a lua script to do what I want. Here's some of the features I have added.  Let me know if this is something we could roll into a new module.

-Configurable cause code to greeting mappings

This lets you define an alternate greeting that will play if your phone is busy, in do not disturb, not registered, etc.  It gives similar functionality to the busy/unavail greetings in Asterisk, but with a lot more flexibility.  I also defined a mapping for "vm-direct", as on our PBX, you can transfer a call to **EXTEN to go straight to voicemail.  On a NO_ANSWER cause, the selected greeting is played, which allows for vacation messages.  If the mappings are set in the database, but the alternate greeting hasn't been recorded, it will use the selected main greeting, or play "the person at extension ... is unavailable".

-Configurable 0 IVR routing

I have put a bit more functionality in the 0 routing.  In our Asterisk implementation, we had 0 go to reception, and # go to the users cell phone.  A lot of people use this.  There isn't a good way to do this in Freeswitch, so we came up with a different option.  In the VM config database that we use, I have an IVR enable flag, as well as an extension slot for digits 0-9.  If the IVR is disabled, pressing 0 transfers to the extension in the 0 slot.  If the IVR is enabled, it uses greeting 9 as the menu, and will let the caller choose an option, transferring them to the extension set in the database.  This lets a user do something like this:

"You have reached Tim, but I'm away from my desk at the moment.  Please leave a message after the tone or press 0 for immediate assistance". ->"For technical support, press 1.  To reach my assistant, press 2.  If you would like to try my cell phone, press 3".

I would also like to see: An option NOT to delete the voice message when you e-mail it from the vm menu. A mechanism to record your name that the dial by name directory module can use. An option to skip the message details before you play them.

I'm sure there are others.

Let me know if you think any of these options are useful.

_______________________________________________ FreeSWITCH-users mailing list FreeSWITCH-users@lists.freeswitch.org http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/freeswitch-users UNSUBSCRIBE:http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/options/freeswitch-users http://www.freeswitch.org

-- Kristian Kielhofner http://www.astlinux.org http://blog.krisk.org http://www.star2star.com http://www.submityoursip.com http://www.voalte.com

Anthony, I intend to make a list but I wanted to start by: 1) Gauging interest in making this an open source project. 2) Seeing what other people have done (I'm certainly not the first to think of this). Don't focus too much on Asterisk, I'm not. The real goal of this effort is to provide a powerful, easy to use, COMPLETELY customizable voicemail interface for FreeSWITCH. FreeSWITCH is one of the most powerful pieces of software I have ever used and mod_voicemail is an excellent start. However, every user, company, and organization in the world has a different idea of what "voicemail" should be like. Asterisk, Mitel, Avaya, legacy Nortel, NEC, Shoretel, cell carriers like T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, etc. All slightly different prompt structures and feature sets. In our case we're coming from Asterisk so at first it will need to emulate Asterisk. Eventually we're going to run it in two modes "legacy voicemail" and "enhanced voicemail" (with our own menu design and feature set). Enhanced voicemail should also have advanced unified messaging capabilities (I feel so slimy for using that buzzword) and other features integrated with our architecture that just aren't practical for us to implement in C. Having to modify mod_voicemail and recompile it to meet some of these needs is less than ideal. If all goes to plan FreeSWITCH will have the best (in my opinion) "voicemail" application in the industry, making it easier for admins/users of other systems to migrate to FreeSWITCH and further FreeSWITCH in its quest to take over the world. What's wrong with that? ;) On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 11:31 AM, Anthony Minessale <anthony.minessale@gmail.com> wrote:

Maybe you should start with an extensive list of what you can't do with mod_voicemail that you are missing.

The thought of making a separate module to pretend to be Asterisk makes me sad.  I consider that a step backwards. If you want to make mod_voicemail better so you can personally do anything you choose with it (such as make it emulate other systems) that's a *bit* better.

-- Kristian Kielhofner http://www.astlinux.org http://blog.krisk.org http://www.star2star.com http://www.submityoursip.com http://www.voalte.com

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 12:32 PM, Steven Ayre <steveayre@gmail.com> wrote:

mod_voicemail is already open source.

Yep.

If you want a feature not in it, specify what it is so that it can be added, or someone can chime in with a tip on how you can already do it. Or you could even supply a patch which adds the feature.

I know I could. However, this development and patch would only meet *my* needs *right now*. What about my future needs? What about some other guy that loves FreeSWITCH but can't leave Avaya-style voicemail? When it really comes down to it an implementation in LUA would be far easier to customize. To be honest I've never really understood why Asterisk voicemail is a C module and why FreeSWITCH voicemail is a C module when both applications (especially FreeSWITCH) provide so many ways to accomplish the same goals without being tied into a C module. Mod_conference is muxing different audio streams at different sample rates, doing speaker detection, etc. That makes perfect sense to implement in C. Voicemail is basically an IVR app. How many people develop IVR apps in C? How many people use LUA, Perl, ESL, etc? The FreeSWITCH wiki, docs, etc encourage quick and easy application development using these existing interfaces (Lua, JS, ESL, etc). All I'm trying to do is build an application. This application just happens to be what most people usually refer to as "voicemail".

So the list of what's missing is really what's useful.

I could provide a list of what is missing for Asterisk voicemail but my list today would never be the end-all-be-all of voicemail. An implementation in LUA would make it significantly easier for almost anyone to endlessly customize voicemail to meet their needs, now and in the future. Then again maybe I'm completely wrong about LUA for voicemail. I still think it's worth investigating. -- Kristian Kielhofner http://www.astlinux.org http://blog.krisk.org http://www.star2star.com http://www.submityoursip.com http://www.voalte.com

Anthony, Understood and your logic makes perfect sense (as always). I think contrib would be a great place for it :). On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 3:56 PM, Anthony Minessale <anthony.minessale@gmail.com> wrote:

They are C because they are expected to load and work and there is 0 tolerance for missteps typically.

a LUA one is ok but that's in the realm of the users.  I would not ever ship an external app as part of the main distribution but naturally making your own external systems is why we made FS modular.

If you want to do it in LUA it would probably end up in contrib.

-- Kristian Kielhofner http://www.astlinux.org http://blog.krisk.org http://www.star2star.com http://www.submityoursip.com http://www.voalte.com

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 10:37 PM, Anthony Minessale <anthony.minessale@gmail.com> wrote:

Interops with SIP over messaging for MWI and message count.

And mod_skinny ;) Mathieu Parent