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Call Blast

Posted by dozment on Tue, 05/27/2008

One of my customers (a church) needs the ability to do a call blast from our system. Basically, they have a list of possible first-responders for emergency calls. If an emergency happens on campus the would like to dial an extension, enter an auth code, record a quick message, and have that message delivered to multiple phones as quickly as possible.

I know asterisk can handle this. Anyone have any thoughts on how it can be done with TL MTE?


Submitted by dozment on Tue, 05/27/2008 Permalink

Now, that's funny!

I actually had that script in mind when I started down this path, but it doesn't exactly match the request in this case. The script I wrote (using that term loosely so that no one confuses me with someone who can actually write code) leaves multiple voicemail messages on my * server.

These guys want to record a message and then have that message delivered to multiple cell phones instead of dropping it into voicemail boxes. I envisioned recording the call and using /var/spool/asterisk/outgoing to send out the message.

Thanks for the quick response and the laugh!

Submitted by eeman on Tue, 05/27/2008 Permalink

there isnt anything in TL MTE that would do this. This is completely customized code. I assume that even though this is MTE the campus comprises multiple tenants and there are no other tenants not affiliated with this customer?

Before I delve into this complex solution, lets first consider the KISS approach. Are all these cell phones PDA cell phones capable of playing the voicemail-to-email attachments? If they are, using your already written script would solve your problem without a tonne of custom code.

Assuming the answer is no, there is some code I wrote that could be modified to handle this. Theres some code I did some work on for holding your place in a queue and calling the person back when it was time for the next agent. The callers place was held in a MySQL database and then a callfile was created.

you could modify this code to fill the database with recipients and have the daemon create your call files for you. Your biggest challenge is to limit the calls to available outbound channels. If you have a PRI with 23 channels and 5 are in use when you kick this off, and your distribution list is 35 people; only 18 first responders will get called. The callfile will need to declare number of retries and interval between retries.

Here is the example of the callback daemon. I threw it on a wiki I never got around to building.

callback daemon:

http://wiki.pbx.bluegrass.net/index.php/Callback_daemon

mysql schema:

http://wiki.pbx.bluegrass.net/index.php/Callback_mysql_schema

a dialplan example of using the callback daemon:

http://wiki.pbx.bluegrass.net/index.php/Callback_dialplan_example

Submitted by eeman on Tue, 05/27/2008 Permalink

you even drop them in a conference room after the playback of the message so all first-responders could coordinate their response.