System information

CHAPTER 11
Parking and Paging
I don’t believe in angels, no. But I do have a wee parking
angel. It’s on my dashboard and you wind it up. The
wings flap and it’s supposed to give you a parking space.
It’s worked so far.
—Billy Connolly
This chapter will focus on two important aspects of a PBX system: parking calls to allow
them to be answered from a location different from where they were originally an-
swered, and paging, which allows the announcement of who the call is for and how it
can be retrieved.
In Asterisk, these two functionalities are exclusive to one another, and can be used
independently of one another. Some businesses that contain large warehouses, or have
employees who move around the office a lot and don’t necessarily sit at a desk all day,
utilize the paging and parking functionality of their systems to direct calls around the
office. In this chapter we’ll show you how to use both parking and paging in the tra-
ditional setting, along with a couple of more modern takes on this commonly used
functionality.
features.conf
There are several features common to most modern PBXs that Asterisk also provides.
Many of these features have optional parameters. The features.conf file is where you
can adjust or define the various feature parameters in Asterisk.
DTMF-Based Features
Many of the parameters in features.conf only apply when invoked on calls that have
been bridged by the dialplan applications Dial() or Queue(), with one or more of the
options K, k, H, h, T, t, W, w, X, or x specified. Features accessed in this way are DTMF-
based (meaning they can’t be accessed via SIP messaging, but only through touch-tone
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