Voicespan

Customers need to be able to answer the phone quickly and easily, it’s still the life-blood of most businesses. But smaller companies don’t always have a receptionist, especially if they don’t get a lot of visitors. So companies like these rely on the phone being picked up in rota, or by any one of a subset of the workforce.

With such scenarios, the employees will likely use a group pickup function, where phones are added to a pickup group so that it one of them rings, then any other phone in the group can dial a short code (or press a button that does it automatically) and ‘grab’ the call. It’s very standard functionality in office phone systems, whether they be analogue, digital or VoIP.

Asterisk actually has a bit of a kludgy way of achieving this, which is reflected in the way that FreePBX-fronted systems implement the functionality. Rather than creating a Pickup Group in the way that you might create, say, a Ring Group, instead you have to specify a group in the extension. This is a reflection of the fact that pickup does not work across all extension types, IAX2 extensions being the notable absence. This had me scratching my head for a bit the first time I tried it.

I should also say that picking up a call at a known extension is simple, just dial **ext (e.g. **220 to pickup a call at extension 220). The scenario we’re looking at here is when you want to pick up a call at an unknown extension.

In case you’ve been struggling with this, here a quick run down of what you need to consider.

1. It’s easiest to implement this when all your extensions are SIP devices. With IAX2 in the mix, you’ll probably want to try another approach.
2. For each extension you have to specify both a callgroup and a pickupgroup.
3. An extension can only belong to 1 CallGroup (0 to 63).
4. However, an extension can belong to multiple PickupGroups (e.g. 1,2). In essence this means that an extension in one CallGroup can be configured to pickup calls from other CallGroups.

One this is all defines, then dialling *8 on an extension will allow it to ‘grab’ calls from other extensions in the CallGroups listed in it’s PickupGroup attribute. In practice, you will probably specify just 1 CallGroup and PickupGroup for each extension to keep things simple. We like simple!