Page 506 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

The PrivacyManager() application can also accept the arguments in the
dialplan. This allows the value to remain in memory, instead of an I/O
operation to the disk to read the configuration file, which you would
only worry about with high usage of this application (many calls per
second).

queues.conf

Asterisk provides basic call center functionality via its queueing system, but those who
are using it in more mission-critical environments often report that their solutions re-
quired customization. You can do this customization in the queues.conf file.
The [general] section of queues.conf contains settings that will apply to all queues. If
the persistentmembers parameter is set to yes, a member that is added to the system
via the AddQueueMember() application or through the Asterisk Manager Interface will be
stored in the AstDB, and therefore retained across a restart.

The autofill parameter allows Asterisk to be more efficient in the way it distributes
calls to queue members, especially if there are multiple callers in the queue and multiple
queue members available to receive the call. It is recommended you set autofill to yes.
Another general parameter of queues.conf is MonitorType. If set to MixMonitor, it will
mix the inbound and outbound audio streams. If set to Monitor, it will revert to the
older method of recording the inbound and outbound audio in separate files.
Next you can define one or more queues by placing its name inside of square brackets
([]). Within each queue, the following parameters are available:
musiconhold
This parameter allows you to configure which music-on-hold class (configured in
musiconhold.conf) to use for the queue.
announce
When a call is presented to a member of the queue, the prompt specified by
announce will be played to that agent before the caller is connected. This can be
useful for agents who are logged in to more than one queue. You can specify either
the full path to the file, or a path relative to /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/.
strategy
Asterisk can use six strategies to distribute calls to agents:
ringall
The queue rings every available agent and connects the call to whichever agent
answers first (this is the default).
roundrobin (deprecated)
The queue cycles through the agents until it finds one who is available to take
the call. roundrobin does not take into account the workload of the agents.
Also, because roundrobin always starts with the first agent in the queue, this

478 | Appendix D: Configuration Files