Dialing From Phonebook, And Hiding The Dialed Number From The User.

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Asterisk Users 3 Comments

Hi,

does anyone have a recommendation for a SIP phone, which allows dialing from a phonebook, and hiding the dialed number from the end users? Also from the call history of course.

It seems Mitel can do this, and I have a use case where this is a requirement.

Thanks, Antonio

3 thoughts on - Dialing From Phonebook, And Hiding The Dialed Number From The User.

  • I don’t know about a phone that can do that, but I can give you another possibility that might be an acceptable substitute.

    You could alias the numbers in the phone so that in Asterisk they do something different. In the phonebook you would have something like: Bob Smith: 1000. Then in Asterisk, you have as part of your dialplan that 1000
    would dial Bob Smith’s real number. The user of the phone would only ever see the number 1000 associated with Bob Smith. The history would still be there in the phone, but again, it would just show 1000 as well.

    How far you take this would depend somewhat on how often the underlying numbers change. You could hard code the numbers in your Asterisk dialplan or you could plug them into a database so that they are easier to change in the future. Would that work for what you need?

  • If I have this right, you want to make sure the number can *only* be called through your Asterisk system (so the call gets recorded) and *not* directly from an agent’s mobile phone or similar (so they cannot make off-the-record calls).

    Why not just use Asterisk itself to give the number an alias? So the end user dials some number that connects them to the destination, but of course it won’t work from anywhere else besides your configured Asterisk system.

    My home Asterisk installation (yes, some people are crazy enough to play with phones for entertainment 🙂 ) includes aliases to call people in the village where I grew up, using their old 4-digit phone numbers (even though those numbers have now grown to 6 digits, and I have moved across an STD code boundary). Also I have a friend whose mobile number ended with 911, so it was too delicious to avoid using that as an alias;

    exten => 911,1,Dial(${GSM}/07xxxxxx911)
    exten => 911,n,Hangup()

    exten => _[23]XXX,1,Dial(${GSM}/0128373${EXTEN})
    exten => _[23]XXX,n,Hangup()

    If you need many aliases and this is going to look messy in your dialplan, you could always use an AGI script to look up the number in a database.