Auto-dial emergency services

Certain customer installations may require a 'dummy' phone deployed in a publically accessible location that only dials emergency services (911 here in the US). You may be familiar with this type of phone. Think about a location like a theatre or golf course where there is a phone deployed in the foyer or club house, and when you lift the receiver of this phone, a pre-determined number is dialed (perhaps the concierge). You can program this same logic into your system by following the steps below.

1. Create a new sub-menu called emergency in AutoAnswer --> submenu (this sub-menu name becomes a usable context in FONcore)

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2. Modify the sub-menu to do what you want. You may include the step forward call to number and then forward to 911. You can get creative with how you forward the call from within the submenu. Perhaps you call the Security Guard if your organization is large enough to employ a guard.

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3. Go to Options --> cards and change to Advanced view so that you can manually modify the Zapata.conf file.

4. For the analog extensions you want to be emergency phones, add these lines:

context=emergency (should be set to internal by default)
immediate=yes

5. Click Apply All Changes to save the file.

Explanation - when you set the ‘immediate=yes’ in /etc/asterisk/Zapata.conf, the phone automatically goes off-hook and follows the rules of whatever context it is set to (in this case ‘emergency’).  Since the ‘emergency’ context is actually our sub-menu, it can do whatever a sub-menu can normally do.  The way we have configured 'emergency', the phone immediately places an outbound call to 911.

Some call this functionality the Batphone because the phone follows some pre-determined behavior.  You could imagine setting this up in a sports complex so that the phone calls the box office automatically.  The "house" phone in a theatre.  There are so many uses!