Line Appearance Keys on Asterisk

We are looking are replacing our aging NEC phone system with Asterisk.
One of our issues is that we require all CO lines to be visible and key accessable on all desk phones. We have 8 outside lines.

  1. We are having trouble locating SIP phones with at least 8 line keys.
    The ones we have found seem to be huge administrator phones. I really don’t need 45 large phones in a retail environment.

  2. Asterisk does not seem to have programming to control and display they keys even if I do get the phones.

Ideas?

Try the snom 360 phone. It has 12 soft keys. I dont know if I’d call it an ‘administrator phone’, but it’s certainly not a secretary phone (although it can be with the sidecar…).

  1. Asterisk as of 1.2 does not handle this very well. As of 1.4 it should have SLA (shared line appearance), but I haven’t gotten to play with that yet so I have no idea if it will do what you need. It will certainly be closer than anything 1.2 has…

Snom 320’s would be worth a look too, but I think you will need to wait for Asterisk v1.4 for this work exactly as you want it to.

Mike.