Help with Intercom/Auto-Answer Buttons on Polycom

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

I am very new to working with IP phones so please bear with me if I sound like I don’t know what I’m talking about!

We have a network with ~25 phones, mostly Polycom 501s and a handful of 601s. We’re using FreePBX/Asterisk/Sip3.1.8 and I currently have the additional buttons on the phone/sidecars (I believe they’re called softkeys) set to be speed dials with buddywatch enabled. (Buddywatch = BLF = Presence = extension status monitoring) After getting everything set up, the customer is now requesting that some of the buttons be set as “intercom” buttons.

For example, the receptionist, Kay, has a Polycom 601 with a sidecar. Her phone has the following MACADDR-directory.xml:

[code]<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>

201 1 1 203 2 1 204 3 1 205 4 1 206 5 1 [/code]

I would like to add a button that dials *80203 or the equivalent. Kay needs to be able to press a speed dial button for 203 to call that extension, and another button that calls 203 and has 203 auto-answer on speaker (like an intercom) Manually dialing *80203 works, but they want a button that does it.

Is this possible? I have spent a lot of time researching it and I may just not be connecting the dots, but it seems like I should be able to do. Any help is greatly appreciated!

2

I found that I needed to install the Intercom and Paging module and I was told it should work out of the box. When I dial *80203 from a phone, it will ring for 2 seconds on extension 203 and then hang up. The phone making the call gets a busy signal after one ring. I’ve been searching for the answer and have not found anything yet (except some guy that made a typo) I’ve also dialed *54 but it does not seem to make any difference. Could someone point me in the right direction please? I got the buttons working using EFK but they don’t work since *80 doesn’t work properly. Thanks in advance!