Parking Wishlist

This is just a wishlist for the optimal way to handle parking. Most of this cannot be done now, due to limitations in Asterisk and on phones..

• Phone has a 'park' button, which works exactly like a 'hold' button, except puts the call in the parking lot (in otherwords, like a global hold)
  • When the call is parked, the slot number is read back to you, and also displayed on the LCD (if the phone has one).
• Phones have a number of buttons (2 to 6 or more, depending on the company size) for monitoring the parking lot. When a call is parked, the corresponding button lights up (or blinks). Pressing it takes the call out of the lot and makes it active on one of your line/call apperance keys.
  • You'd still be able to dial the slot number (like you can now) to pickup a parked call as well, which is useful if a call is parked in a slot you can't monitor, or you're on a phone with no parking slot keys
• For extra points, pressing a parking slot key that is unoccupied while on a call would park the call in that slot.

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• Metermaid can probably provide the hints for monitoring parking slot calls.
• If a phone could have a speed dial of #70 programmed, it would be able to make a key to park calls. So far every phone we've tried will not send the #
  • Alternatively, maybe it is possible to patch asterisk to have an alternate parking sequence, eg **970 ? If we change # to something else, it might work, but would break backwards compatibility with what we have now.

• OpenPbxOrg has app_valetparking built in, from their code:

ValetParking(<exten>|<lotname>|<timeout>[|<return_ext>][|<return_pri>][|<return_context>])
Auto-Sense Valet Parking: if <exten> is not occupied, park it, if it is already parked, bridge to it.

ValetParkCall(<exten>|<lotname>|<timeout>[|<return_ext>][|<return_pri>][|<return_context>])
Park Call at <exten> in <lotname> until someone calls ValetUnparkCall on the same <exten> + <lotname>
set <exten> to 'auto' to auto-choose the slot.

ValetUnparkCall(<exten>|<lotname>)
Un-Park the call at <exten> in lot <lotname> use 'fifo' or 'filo' for auto-ordered Un-Park.

• This supports hints (http://trac.openpbx.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/ticket/154), so it should be possible to park/pickup on a key on a phone using the ValetParking() app