astqueueicon

This is the home of astqueueicon, a nifty tool for abusing asterisk's call parking feature as a "more handy" calling queue application.

The main difference of the astqueueicon calling queue compared to the regular asterisk queue is the way calls are connected to the agents. When you use astqueueicon, each agent can pick up a caller at any time by simple calling the first parking extension (701, 702, ...) to take automatically parked calls. This has some major advantages or disadvantages - depending on how your workplace is set up and what kind of queue you really need:

• The agent has exact control if and when to service the next incoming call. you can even put the current caller on hold, write a question in a messanger or chat system to a colleague who maybe has an answer to the customers question and service another call on the second line while you are waiting for an answer.
• You can use asterisk's call transfer feature (press the star key * followed by the target extension) without hazzle from any type of phone, even with X-Lite! (But thats really more kind of a problem of the native queue app then a feature here...) ;)
• You can set up a very gentle acoustic notification that your queue is freaking out to motivate other employees to help smoothing the peaks.
• It's very intuitive to use - no agent log-in-and-out and whatever sequences your employees would forget anyway over and over again.
• And the most important advantage: You can go to pee without having your phone ringing constantly or callers being dropped!

For an impression of what you get you should have a look at the Screenshots.

Please note that the astqueueicon client app is only available for ms windows at this time... :-(

Since the program exactly does what the author wanted, don't expect too much action in the news section.

I think this app is a must-have in the productive asterisk-in-the-office environment, but the project stats are somehow not so exciting as I would expect :-(. If you decided to download and test the program, please feel free to leave a note of your user experience, escpecially if you encounter any problems not covered in the setup instructions..