On a regular PBX, you get indication lights or lamps on your handset, at minimum they are if an extension is busy it will light up, if a line busy it will light up, if a call is waiting and message lamp. The ext and line status lights are office wide so reception can instantly see that office gal 4 is on another call but how to do this with asterisk?
blf - make sure your phone supports them.
In asterisk, you set up a hint. In extensions add hints for the blf/presense that you need.
In asterisk 1.6 you have pattern matching for hints. I believe in 1.4 you have to code each hint.
1.6 hint — exten => _[23]XXX,hint,SIP/${EXTEN}
In your phone you setup a blf key…with the extensions you want to show the status of.
When your phone starts, it will register to the asterisk server for hints. Then when asterisk sees the status of an extension change, it will update the hint. Since the phone is registered to watch that hint, asterisk will notify your phone of the change of state.
I am getting some success with this using Thomson ST2030 IP phones, still too early to tell.
just so we all on the same page, In a production system, an extension is assigned to a key on every handset, when that extension is busy its lit up on every handset so everyone can instantly know he/she is busy, this is especially useful for the receptionist who can instantly know to hold,transfer etc, this basic feedback is essential for a pbx so I hope handset manufactures get asterisk friendly.
It’s a SIP feature rather than specifically an Asterisk one.
Note that it doesn’t scale well to very large numbers of extensions - I think some proprietary systems may send bitmaps.
I have the same need on Cisco SPA 508G phone.
I have seen that it supports BLF.
What exactly do I have to add on extension.conf to have BLF working?
I have Asterisk 1.6.2.15 and FreePbx 2.7.
Thank you!
Check out the second post of this thread 