FreePBX was primarily designed to be a simple and easy to tool for programming asterisk dialplan and call flow. In the name of simplicity, however, it is sometimes necessary to sacrifice advanced features and overly complex ways of doing things. FreePBX takes a great middle ground in providing the best of both worlds: on one hand, an extremely powerful yet intuitive and simple GUI, and on the other hand a really neat way to seamlessly extend the gui into 'raw' dialplan. This is done using a combination of the Custom and Miscellaneous modules.

FreePBX 2.5 breaks down Time Conditions in to two separate modules: Time Groups and Time Conditions. The reason? To confuse you! Nay, we wouldn't do that. But in case we did, this should set the record straight.

If you have already heard about the Magic Button, read on because the feature set has expanded by a factor of five. This post is to inform the community about the upcoming community release of the Magic Button software, as well as the upcoming availability of the new LumenVox Community Speech Licensing Server.

Along with requests for the Asterisk Voice Recognition "Magic Button", I have had numerous requests over the last couple days for the Asterisk Voice Recognition Company Directory (AVRCD). As promised before, I am releasing the source for the company directory. Drop to the bottom for links to a demo and all the source files for the Company Directory or keep reading for details.

Making Follow Me and VmX Locater Work Together

FreePBX is often referred to as a GUI to manage Asterisk configuration files. This misconception leads to confusion when Asterisk knowledgeable users begin to dig into a FreePBX system and find so many things that look foreign or different from what they are used to.

Overriding a Time Condition with a feature code is a request that has been asked for since as long as Time Conditions have been available in FreePBX. It comes up regularly on the forums and there have been many custom versions implemented and posted to solve this problem. We have introduced a Day/Night Control module to provide this ability as mentioned in an announcement a few weeks ago.

In last week’s FreePBX® Technical Series we reviewed the current ring strategies: ringall, hunt and memoryhunt. We clarified the mystery of the “-prim” postfix on these and discussed some subtle behaviors between DND implemented in FreePBX® (server side) versus locally on the phone. This week we will review some up and coming Ring Strategies and fill you in on a secret to enable the voicemail busy message when your multi-line phone is never actually busy.

This week’s FreePBX® Technical Series will discuss the different Ring Group and Follow-Me ring strategies in FreePBX® 2.2 and what is coming next. The basic modes will be discussed and the question: “What is that –prim” version of all the strategies?” will be answered. Next week, new enhancements and new Ring Strategies that are forth coming will be described (or available now if you are adventurous and like to run the development branch).