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defined here, it will be required to enter all conferences using that room.) For our
example, let’s set up a conference room at extension 600. First, we’ll set up the con-
ference room in meetme.conf. We’ll call it 600, and we won’t assign a password at this
time:

[rooms]
conf => 600
Now that the configuration file is complete, we’ll need to restart Asterisk so that it can
reread the meetme.conf file. Next, we’ll add support for the conference room to our
dialplan with the MeetMe() application. MeetMe() takes three arguments: the name of
the conference room (as defined in meetme.conf), a set of options, and the password
the user must enter to join this conference. Let’s set up a simple conference using room
600, the i option (which announces when people enter and exit the conference), and a
password of 54321:
exten => 600,1,MeetMe(600,i,54321)
That’s all there is to it! When callers enter extension 600, they will be prompted for the
password. If they correctly enter 54321, they will be added to the conference. See Ap-
pendix B for a list of all the options supported by the MeetMe() application.
Another useful application is MeetMeCount(). As its name suggests, this application
counts the number of users in a particular conference room. It takes up to two
arguments: the conference room in which to count the number of participants, and
optionally a variable name to assign the count to. If the variable name is not passed as
the second argument, the count is read to the caller:

exten => 601,1,Playback(conf-thereare)
exten => 601,n,MeetMeCount(600)
exten => 601,n,Playback(conf-peopleinconf)
If you pass a variable as the second argument to MeetMeCount(), the count is assigned
to the variable, and playback of the count is skipped. You might use this to limit the
number of participants, like this:
; limit the conference room to 10 participants
exten => 600,1,MeetMeCount(600,CONFCOUNT)
exten => 600,n,GotoIf($[${CONFCOUNT} <= 10]?meetme:conf_full,1)
exten => 600,n(meetme),MeetMe(600,i,54321)
exten => conf_full,1,Playback(conf-full)
Isn’t Asterisk fun?

Conclusion

In this chapter, we’ve covered a few more of the many applications in the Asterisk
dialplan, and hopefully we’ve given you the seeds from which you can explore the
creation of your own dialplans. As with the previous chapter, we invite you to go back
and reread any sections that require clarification.

Conclusion | 165