AMP: Using Users and Devices
ImageEven though many people have been using the Asterisk Management Portal (AMP) interface to configure and maintain their Asterisk setups, not everyone knows about some of the customizations that can be done to it. In this article, we are going under the hood of AMP and looking at the ability to separate users and devices. This setup is useful for roaming users (users that change locations a lot) or for locations that run multiple shifts with different users sharing the same desk.
For simplicity, AMP noDevice Menurmally combines users and devices into a single object known as an extension. This default behaviour makes the most sense for installations where each user uses their own phone device. This works well for the vast majority of the installations out there but what about the exceptions to this rule? One of the biggest selling points about Asterisk is the ability to have remote extensions and soft phones, however the problem now becomes having to manage two, three, or even more extensions per user and then having to manage ring groups for each user. Another exception is a business with multiple shifts of people who share the same desk but would like to have their own extensions. In the past, about the only way to do this was either some complicated scripts to reassign extension numbers, shared extensions, or manual changes constantly.
With the current versions of AMP, you can now separate the actual phone devices from the users giving you a whole new level of flexibility.
Splitting The Extensions
The /etc/amportal.conf is the configuration file for AMP and is the only file we need to change to enable the new setup. You will need to edit the file and look for the setting for AMPEXTENSIONS and change this to deviceanduser.
# AMPEXTENSIONS: the type of view for extensions admin# If set to ‘deviceanduser’ Devices and Users will be administered seperately, $# If set to ‘extensions’ Devices and Users will me administered in a single scr$
AMPEXTENSIONS=deviceanduser
With the setting changed, you can issue the command:
amportal restart
Once everything has restarted, we can now log into the AMP interface and begin to configure the new settings.
Instead of the Extensions menu, you know have different menu options for Users and Devices. Since devices are assigned to Users, we need to create our users first.
User MenuDevices
Adding a user is pretty similar to how we used to create extensions. Each user is assigned an extension number that will be uniquely assigned to the user. The password, which used to be used to authenticate the device to the PBX is now used for the user to log into a device. The display name is still used for internal caller id as well as for the company directory.
Users
With our users created, we now create our devices that we will be using. Each device needs its own unique number assigned to it but this is only used for authentication to the Asterisk server. The description will help you keep track of your devices, I use this to keep track of the device’s location such as “Kerry Home”, “Front Desk”, “Desk 2”, etc.
The device type is where the power of this new feature really shines. There are two options for Device Type, Fixed and Ad Hoc. A Fixed device is always assigned to the same user/extension. Using the Fixed setting is how we can have the same user assigned to multiple devices. Again, back to my case, I have a desk phone, a softphone on my primary workstation, a softphone on my laptop, and an ATA that I take from location to location. I can now have all of these devices assigned to my one user account.
With the Ad Hoc setting, this is how we can support multiple users sharing the same device. Using *11 to login, and *12 to log out, different users can sit down at any phone and login as themselves. There are two situations where this has worked out extremely well, in one case, a marketing firm uses several WiFi VoIP phones that are kept at the receptionist desk. When a sales rep comes into the office, the receptionist hands the rep a WiFi phone, they login to the device as their extension and nobody has to keep track of who has what phone that day as you only use the person’s actual extension. This is similar to another situation where a real estate office has around 50 agents but only a few are ever in the office at the same time. When an agent comes in, they pick any available desk, login to the device using their extension information and they are up and working in seconds.
Asterisk Management Portal is available from Coalescent Systems
He made some interesting comments about an impending price war with PC based service providers including Skype, Yahoo with Google sure to follow up with yet another trump card here.