Park and Pickup

From Pbxnsip Wiki

What happens when a call is being parked?

When a user parks a call, he disconnects himself from a call and puts the call onto a park orbit. The other side of the call then hears music on hold.

Parking a call is different from holding a call. In some systems, call hold behavior is called exclusive parking because only the user that holds or parks the call can retrieve the call. In SIP-based system it is better to use the term parking for the (non-exclusive) parking of a call and the term holding for a (exclusive) hold of a call because SIP was designed this way.

Every extension and every hunt group has a park orbit where several calls can be parked. When a user parks a call, he can explicitly specify where a call should be parked (e.g. *85111 parks the call on the park orbit of extension 111). If the user does not specify where the call should be parked, the call will be parked on the orbit of the extension that initiates the park operation.

Determining which call is being picked up

In most cases it is possible that there are several calls parked at the same time. This makes it necessary to define an algorithm that determines which call should be picked up. Additionally, it is also necessary to check if the caller has the permission to retrieve the call. For example, if the secretary parked an important customer on the orbit of the boss extension, not everybody should have the right to pick that call up -- accidentally or on purpose.

The PBX checks for call in the following sequence:

If the user explicitly specifies the orbit from which the call should be retrieved, then the PBX will retrieve a call that is on that orbit.

Then the PBX will check if a call was parked on the orbit of the calling extension.

After that the PBX will determined to which hunt groups the user belongs.

If a call was parked on the hunt group parking orbit the PBX will retrieve that call.

If a call was parked on the orbit of one of the hunt group members, the PBX will get that call. Starting with version, the PBX will also pick up calls from all other orbits, if the pickup policy flag is set accordingly.