Using Parking Lots

Parking lots are a convenient way to put on hold or transfer calls from one extension to another one. They can be monitored using a BLF key. Parking lots are defined as a range of extensions, by default from 700 to 720, reserved for transferring, holding and later retrieving of calls. Due to a limitation in asterisk configuration, once parking lots are created, they cannot be changed without a module restart. You can restart the module using the “parking” icon in Admin/PBX Nodes. Due to this limitation, the definition of parking lots is reserved to admins when the tenant is defined. The tenant admin can define how long a call is held in a parking lot before returning to the parking extension, using the Configuration/Setting menu.

A call can be parked in several ways:

• by transfering the call to one of the parking lot extension, like it was an extension. If the transfer will be “blind”, parking lot number will not be played (but you know it because you dialed it).
• by using a feature code to “Park the call”, in this way the parking lot number will be played to the caller, if you blind transfer to the feature code, the parking lot number will not be played. You need to find another way to get the list of the parking lot where the call got parked.
• by using a feature code to “Park the call to [NUM]” and dialing the feature code along with the parking lot number, in this way the parking lot number will be played to the caller, if you blind transfer to the feature code, the parking lot number will not be played (but you know it because you dialed it).

A call can be retrieved by a parking lot by dialing the parking lot number

The list of parked calls can be retrieved using the feature code “Say the parked call extensions”

A parking lot can be monitored using BLF by using the parking lot number followed by “-” and the tenant code, like for monitoring parking lot 800 in the DEVEL tenant, use a BLF for 800-DEVEL.

When you park a call in a parking lot, by blind or attended transfer, the callerid of the call is saved in the parking lot. When the parking lot timeout, the parking phone will receive a call using that callerid. Not only, when retrieving a call from a parking lot, the phone can display the callerid of the parked call. To be able to see the callerid of the parked call, a small change is needed on the definition of the extension, enabling the “Trust RPID” setting and most important, allowing the processing of RPID info in the phone. For Yealink for example, it is needed to set the “Caller ID Source” to RPID-PAI-FROM.