We have started testing the Digium phones and DPMA using FreePBX. I’ve got everything configured and one phone working. Most users will be assigned a phone and never need to change, but we do have some users that bounce around to different locations or offices. How do we “sign off” the phones? Not sure if I’m using the proper term here, but let’s say I’m working in Office A today and tomorrow I’ll be in Office B down the street. How do I remove my association from a particular unit at the end of the day? That way when the next user comes to this unit it’s ready for them to load their profile.
Howdy,
That get accomplished via someone either unloading themselves (put the phone into a reconfigure state via Menu, Advanced, Reconfigure); or, when the person configures them self at the second location, the first location will have its configuration forcibly dropped by Asterisk and will reboot.
Ah, I see. Is there a way to trigger or push a “reconfigure” command to certain phones? This may be a bit unnecessary, but I’m trying to consider if Susie Teller is at work today and then calls in sick tomorrow, but is still assigned to a particular phone.
You can drop the SIP peer that’s associated with their phone from Asterisk’s SIP config, reload res_digium_phone.so, and it should send a reconfigure notice to the phone.
Thanks Malcolm. I’ve used several of your posts here and over on the freepbx forums to get everything setup with DPMA. I really appreciate you taking the time and answering my questions!
You’re welcome.
I’m also wrong. Dropping the SIP peer won’t do it. Dropping the phone from res_digium_phone.conf will do it.
The easiest way to do it right now would probably be training your users to just default their phones when they walk away from their desk (Menu, Advanced, Factory Default). Doing that’ll bring the phone back to default where it’ll look for a config server again. Then, if you’ve got phone PINs setup for phones, people can find their phone, punch in their PIN and get their phone.
We don’t have a great hot desking solution right now. And, I’m not happy with the way that it’s being approached by other devices on the market right now, so we won’t be following in their footsteps entirely.
Or, if you don’t want users factory defaulting their phones all of the time, or doing the Reconfigure thing from the advanced menu, you could write an app that hits some external thing that yanks the phone config from the .conf file and issues the module reload in Asterisk.
We don’t have a large number of users that would need this, but this would really nice for those that did. One of our biggest challenges are users that move around a lot. Find-me-follow-me really isn’t something we want them utilizing. In our case we have tellers that may be at a certain branch today and tomorrow be somewhere else. Again, this is the exception not the rule so we can work around this. I’ll let you know what we end up going with. Thanks again.