Excalibur Partners, LLC | IT Consulting

In Asterisk 1.6, FreePBX, and Exchange UM I mentioned how to setup an extension to transfer a caller to voicemail. Let’s take this one step further and add a soft key on the Polycom. Instead of having to dial ##407ext, you will be able to press the Xfer VM button and it will prompt for the extension.

The first step is to enable the enhanced feature key option and create the prompt in the provisioning file.

<feature feature.18.name="enhanced-feature-keys" feature.18.enabled="1" />
<efk>
  <version efk.version="2" />
  <efklist
    efk.efklist.1.mname="xfervm"
    efk.efklist.1.status="1"
    efk.efklist.1.label="Transfer to Voicemail"
    efk.efklist.1.use.active="1"
    efk.efklist.1.action.string="407$P1N4$$Trefer$"
      />
  <efkprompt
    efk.efkprompt.1.status="1"
    efk.efkprompt.1.label="Extension: "
    efk.efkprompt.1.userfeedback="visible"
    efk.efkprompt.1.type="numeric"
  />
</efk>

The mname in the efklist is what you will use for the soft key action. The prompt will show Transfer to Voicemail as the title. The $P1N4$ means to use ekfprompt 1 and to allow 4 numbers to be entered. $Trefer$ means to blind transfer the current call to the digits in front.

Now we need to create the softkey. I also like to disable the on screen transfer and conference soft keys since as we have physical buttons for them. This allows the Xfer VM button to fit on the first page of soft keys.

<softkey
  softkey.1.label="Xfer VM"
  softkey.1.action="!xfervm"
  softkey.1.enable="1"
  softkey.1.use.active="1"
  softkey.1.use.hold="1"
  softkey.1.precede="0"
  softkey.feature.basicCallManagement.redundant="0"
/>