Remote Pick up, *8

[Anthony Goss]

All of our On Premise IP PBXs have the capability of remote pick up.  The following scenario is all too common: 

You see a Nancy's line ringing, She handles the big - high maintenance client.  Nancy has not made it in yet.  You jump up and start the sprint.. hurdling over desks and catapult over partitions, leaving a wake of toppled over chairs and paperwork floating in the air.  You keep up the sprint, not paying attention to you newly cracked rib from sideswiping the water cooler.  You have it in sight, You have a flashback to your high school football days and go for the 1 yard horizontal leap.  You feel your feet leave the ground, eyes fixed on the handset.  You stretch your arm out and reach for the handset as you belly flop on top of the desk and are impaled by a stapler. You made it!  Out of breath, struggling to maintain your composer you pick up the handset and proudly answer, " Thank you calling, how may I help you?"  Success!  Then you hear, "Hi, this is Rachel from Card Services...."

Don't let this happen to our clients.  Turn on the *8 feature.

[Karl Stallknecht]

Doesn't this already exist? I think it's called Directed Call Pickup

[Karl Stallknecht]

Kudos for the creative story though :)

[Anthony Goss]

How do you do it Karl?  Is it available on hosted?

[Karl Stallknecht]

Yes, it is available on hosted. Go into your call flows (or advanced call flows in Monster), create a new callflow, and then pick an extension...you can add a character like star in front if you want.

Then, go to advanced on the right side and drag/drop the "group pickup" option into the callflow. Select what you want to pickup (whether it's a device, user, or ring group) and then save everything.

If an endpoint that you selected is ringing, any phone can then pick it up by dialing that call flow. For customers who need this feature we usually just setup a call flow to match each device. It's a bit of manual labor to set up if they have a lot of users, but it works fine. In your case you could just do *8 and then add the extension number (i.e. *8101).

To make it easier you can program BLF keys to work with this as well.

[Jack Noe]

Thanks.

 

this post is quite old.

It there a simpler way how to pick up an extension thats ringing somewhere else.

 

So if i see ext 101 is ringing can i pick it up from a different phone in the office.

 

[SPC-Tim]

@Jack Noe

This method is still in practice today. So the steps in here are still valid.

[Jack Noe]

Thanks.

I guess there is no automated star key yet,  it has to be set up manually 

[Uzair Mahmud]

You can do a pivot script for it.

for example your code is *8 for group pickup

to pickup karens call whose extension is say 9001 you would dial *89001 .

This would go to a pivot script which will get karens $user_id from 9001 

and return the following json

'{"module":"group_pickup_feature","data":{"type":"extension","group_id":"'.$user_id.'"}}'

This would automatically work for picking up any number without having to manually program it

[tomas_]

The BLF function on (at least) Grandstreams phones works like a charm.
When enabling the function keys it shows the extension status (green = available, red = busy or not registered), and flashes if the extension are ringing. Pressing the key will pick up the call.
Also works like speed dial and to transfer calls to another extn.

[Olaolu Abiodun]

Works on yealink’s BLF keys as well I believe

[Andres Gomez]

On 3/20/2018 at 11:39 AM, Uzair Mahmud said:

You can do a pivot script for it.

for example your code is *8 for group pickup

to pickup karens call whose extension is say 9001 you would dial *89001 .

This would go to a pivot script which will get karens $user_id from 9001 

and return the following json

'{"module":"group_pickup_feature","data":{"type":"extension","group_id":"'.$user_id.'"}}'

This would automatically work for picking up any number without having to manually program it

Here's exactly what we did:

 

1) Create a callflow/pivot to react to *8 + 4-digit extension:

curl -v -X PUT -H "X-Auth-Token: " -d '{"data":{"flow":{"data":{"method":"GET","req_timeout":"5","req_format":"kazoo","voice_url":"http://pivot.server/path/to/getGrpExtension.php","debug":false},"module":"pivot","children":{}},"numbers":[],"patterns":["^\\*8([0-9]*)$"],"featurecode":{"name":"Group Pickup","number":"8"},"contact_list":{"exclude":true}}}' http://{KAZOO_SERVER}/v2/accounts/{ACCOUNT_ID}/callflows

The script getGrpExtension.php looks like:

<code>

<?php
foreach ($_REQUEST as $key=>$value) {
  $$key = $value;
}
$accountID = $_REQUEST['Account-ID'];
if(preg_match('/^\\*8/', $To)) {
  // Strip off the Feature Code (*8) from $To
  $extension = str_replace('*8','',$To);
}

header('content-type:application/json');

?>
{
    "module": "pivot",
    "data": {
         "voice_url": "http:/{SERVER}/path/to/verifyExtension.php?extension=<?php echo($extension); ?>&accountID=<?php echo($accountID); ?>"
    },
    "children": {}
}

</code>

As you can see, this script sends the Extension and {ACCOUNT_ID} to the next script.

The code in verifyExtension.php looks like this:

<code>

<?php
require_once('/path/to/getAuthToken.php');
$user_id = "";

foreach($_GET as $key=>$value) {$$key = $value;}
$extension = $_GET['extension'];
$accountID = $_GET['accountID'];
$token = authenticateUser();

function fetchUserIDs($token, $accountID, $extension) {

  // We're checking for the extension (stored as "presdence_id") that was dialed, among the users of this account. If/when we find a match, we save  the userID to put in the JSON message going back to Kazoo.
  $userID = "";
  $PID = "";
  $service_url = "http://{KAZOO_SERVER}/v2/accounts/$accountID/users";
  $ch = curl_init($service_url);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("X-Auth-Token: $token"));
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, 'GET');
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
  $response = curl_exec($ch);
  if ($response === false) {
    $info = curl_getinfo($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    die('error occured during curl exec. Additional info: ' . var_export($info));
  }
  $decoded = json_decode($response);
  if (isset($decoded->response->status) && $decoded->response->status == 'ERROR') {
    die('error occured: ' . $decoded->response->errormessage);
  }
  $value = get_object_vars($decoded);
  $data = $value['data'];
  foreach($data as $obj) {
    $PID = $obj->presence_id;
    if($PID == $extension) {
      $userID = $obj->id;
      break;
    }
  }
  curl_close($ch);
  return($userID);
}

$user_id = fetchUserIDs($token, $accountID, $extension);
header('content-type:application/json');

function valid($user_id){
// Is it -> "group_id":"$user_id" OR "user_id":"$user_id" ??
?>

{"module":"group_pickup_feature",
  "data":{"type":"extension","user_id": "<?php echo($user_id); ?>"}
}
<?php
}
if(strlen($user_id) > 1) {valid($user_id);}

// If we didn't get a valid userID, just quit.
?>

</code>

 

We've tested this and it works perfectly.