Summary

In summary, we have looked at how to break down your dialplan into small, manageable contexts or objects. These can then be included into the dialplan to create a system with the flexibility to match any commercial PBX. We also looked at improving the security of the dialplan such that it is easy to manage who can dial where in an understandable way.

We looked at the many different ways that variables can be stored in the system and called upon when required, as well as seeing how they can interact with macros to make the dialplan more streamlined. Here we used one macro for many extensions.

We looked at the DEVSTATE() function and the uses that it can be put to. These are not just (as it initially seems) for checking the status, but also a way to set the status and light a BLF key to show a feature is set.

We looked at time and day call routing, and how it can be used to route calls based on time and day. We also looked at the clever use of date ranges, so that we can future-proof our dialplans for holidays for many years to come.

And finally we looked at the System() application and how this can be used for easing the deployment of handsets in an enterprise solution. In the next chapter, we shall focus on exploring network considerations.