atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX VoIP & Cloud Phones, Hosted PBX, General IP Phones Asterisk as a SIP Voicemail

Does anyone know how to make Asterisk dial a string of Digits to light a message waiting indicator? For instance if you have a SIP enabled Legacy PBX you could connect to an asterisk box over the SIP trunks for a voicemail and IP extensions, but also as voicemail only for Digital and Analog Extensions off the PBX, and have Asterisk Dial for the PBX's MWI on and MWI off codes. Does this make since to anyone? I have looked at extern-notify and it looks like it could be used to turn on a MWI but how about turning it off.

Here's a great link from a guy who sells * as standalone voicemail. This article is specific to a Partner ACS where he replaced the Partner mail VS.

https://www.voip-info.org/wiki/index.php?page=Asterisk-Partner+ACS+for+Voicemail

Ehhh. The short answer is Yes. The long answer involves a package of tylenol, a bottle of high-proof, and a single phrase mumbled over and over of "Lord save me".

Using Asterisk to bring analog/TDM phone systems within striking distance of VoIP trunks is easy. It happens all the time. To have Asterisk replace the voicemail/ACD system and then add the capability of VoIP extensions is a whole other headache.

Before you go out on this adventure I would re-evaluate why you are doing this. How big of a system are you talking about converting? What kind of trunk line capability does it have (T1 PRI hopefully)? To what "Degree" of integration are you looking for? Can you accept that you may only have 80% of the integration working properly (from a features and reliability standpoint)? Does your customer know this?

Your only real hope for a decent "integration" is to strip the system down and reprogram it to be a bare-bones KSU. All features would need to be moved to Asterisk to have everything integrate properly and some of the old features on the handset (transfer, conference) would no longer properly work across the whole thing.

I wish you luck with your endeavor but I think you will find that there are some major gotcha's that may not be well recieved from such an integration. The author of the link in p2ii's post even says that it's not a full integration.

Thanks Kumba I have already successfully setup an Asterisk Box as a Network Node, similar to a QSig network node only using SIP trunks. It allows calls to pass between Digital Phones on the PBX and SIP Phones on the Asterisk Box. I can already pass calls directly through the PBX to a Voicemail box on the Asterisk Box, I am hoping to make it place a call back to the PBX to dial a MWI on Code + Ext.

well if everything else is acceptable then we would need to know more information like what PBX is Asterisk talking to? What voicemail?

Not all systems use in-band DTMF. Some have serial or proprietary protocols.

Did you ever get this to work? I did a similar setup following the voip-info.org article that p2ii referenced. I used externnotify to call a script to turn the MWI on and off. If you would like to see the script I would be happy to send it to you or post it here.

Post it here....knowledge is power. Thanks for the input.

OK, this is the script called from externnotify. Basically externnotify calls the script and passes the context, extension, and number of new messages every time someone accesses their voicemail. So if I left a message on extension 12, it would pass "default, 12, 1" to the script. The script keeps a log at /var/log/asterisk/mwi, so be sure to rotate that log if you leave it enabled.

Also I added this to my extensions.conf:
Hope that helps anyone looking to do the same thing. I would also warn that Kumba's advice on the subject is right on the money (except for mixing Tylenol and high-proof - bad for the liver). The concept of an open source replacement for Amanda, Duovoice, or any other pc based voicemail is pretty compelling but Asterisk has a ways to go before this is anything close to "turnkey".