Can this be done?

I have been playing with Asterisk@Home for the past couple of weeks and I am thouroghly impressed with what Asterisk can accomplish. Enough so that I voluntereed my services to a freind when his home PBX just blew up. I set him up with several Polycom 600s, A digium board and VOIP provider. I set him up with extensions throughout the house with Intercom and paging setup. However with his previous PBX he was setup so that his phones showed the incoming lines and could see if a line was off the hook and if he wanted someone else to pickup the call he would put the call on hold and the line would blink and then another phone could pick it up. The way I have him setup now he cannot see if another line/extension is currently active and he has to transefer or park the call so somone else can answer it.

Is there a way to have Asterisk or Asterisk@Home with the Polycoms to mimic his old system? Or does he have to bite the bullet and learn to live with the way he is configured now.

Thanks for any help in advance, if it can be done could someone give me a brief “how-to” or point me to a tutorial/document.

Hi,

I am not technical enough to give you a how to do it, but…

On our system he have a piece of software running that shows each line and it’s status. Ours is from our system provider, but I have seen referencs to ASterisk FOP or Flash Operator Panel. I think there are others too that do the same thing. Also you Polycom 600 can support six lines, so you could program 5 additional ext. onto the phone in shared mode, but then it would also ring all the time which would probably be annoying. The phones also have A Buddy feature, so you can see the status. Our receptionist has a SNOM360 with the expansion panel which can (and does) show presence information about every extension in our office. It looks just like our old system which also had the blinking lights. So you might want to change devices to SNOMs. We still have to park though if you want to put a call on HOLD and pick it up someplace else. But now we simply transfer around. I hope this helps.

Just in case anyone looking through the archive reads this thread, our system provider is now releasing the software we use to the community. It is called HUDlite for Heads Up Display. (We use the propriatary version)

pcdoc - you are looking for shared line appearance, Asterisk does not support that at this time. To transfer calls, you will have to transfer or park the calls.

However - the Polycom 600 does support buddies and can watch the state of the other phones. If you use hints in your dial plan, then each phone can subscribe to the hints and see the state of the other phones.

There has been talk of SLA coming in 1.4 but I haven’t followed to see if it is really the case. I suspect it is inevitable, it is just a matter of time.

p