Asterisk Callgroups and Pick up groups

Call and pickup groups

Letting someone else answer a call

In the mgcp, SIP, IAX, Skinny and the zapata channels you can define call and pickup groups for phones. Note that call pickup typically only works WITHIN a technology, e.g. from a SIP phone to a SIP phone and not ACROSS technologies, e.g. not from a SIP phone to a IAX phone. If you need that functionality then take a look at the PickUp applications included in bristuff.

The basic functionality is this:

A call is placed in one or several call groups.
If a phone belongs in a pickup group that matches one of the call’s call groups, that phone may pickup the incoming call by calling *8# on his phone.
In v1-0, the feature code seems to be *8# on zap channels, and *8 on SIP channels: *8# does not seem to work from a SIP phone (unless your phone is configured to interpret # as ENTER key).

In Asterisk version 1.0, the groups are 0-31, in versions following 1.0, the groups are 0-63. You can configure the pickup command in features.conf.

You define call and pickupgroup per device (in sip.conf under each extn# section), like:

Callgroup=1
pickupgroup=1-9,13

Common misconception

Callgroups are not intended to call a group of phones; all a callgroup= entry does is to help define who is permitted to perform a pick-up for which calls! If you would like to call a group of phones instead, then you need to a) use either Dial and specify two or more devices separated by &, or b) use queues. Make sure * is not configured as disconnect call if using the default of *8.