Configuring Presence State

Asterisk Asterisk SIP
1

We’re using Jitsi as a client but cannot get presence working, If I change my status to away other users cannot see it.

The Device State however is working fine as we can see when people are on the phone, ringing or dailing and this is reflected on Asterisk by running “core show hints” as their state changes, we can also see that the extensions are being watched, but the presence is “not_set”.

  1. How would I get Asterisk to see the presence state?
  2. Would I be able to configure Asterisk to treat the “Away” presence state as if it were the “BUSY” or “INUSE” device states so people would be skipped in the dial plan?
2

This is not currently supported by Asterisk. We don’t accept the presence information of that type or propagate it.

3

Then why does “core show hints” list a presence column with “not_set” if it doesn’t support it?

4

Presence support is only currently supported by Digium phones, although you can explicitly set and toggle it in the dialplan. It just won’t go out to other types of phones.

5

This feature should really be expanded to include soft-phones then, it would make Asterisk far more useful.

6

A few people have mentioned wanting it over the last few years but I am unaware of any individual currently working on it.

7

Are there any other solutions to getting the presence state to work?

8

There is probably no incentive for Digium to support it, as they want you to buy their hard phones, so you would have to find a community volunteer who finds it to be an interesting project, or to pay a bounty for it. My estimation is that it will not be a trivial change; you are talking about man weeks to man months, I think.