Receptionist Phone With Asterisk and Polycom

I posted the following before:

“Can someone direct me to documentation that might give me a better understanding of configuring a Polycom IP 650 with a Polycom IP BEM add on module as a receptionist phone. In their current scenario with the Toshiba system, the receptionist uses the reception phone and sidebox to determine if a particular extension is busy and to do one button transfers to an extension if it’s not busy. Don’t know if that’s possible with an Asterisk system. Thanks in advance for your replies and assistance.”

I received no replies. Should I interpret that as indicating that this simply can’t be done within Asterisk? I will post this on the Polycom forums as well but am wondering – again – if this is simply something that can’t be done with Asterisk. Or if there is someone who has done this or something similar, we are more than willing to pay for educating us on how to do it.

If it can’t be done, it would seem a serious limitation.

Or, are there better solutions already out there such as a software driven attendant console similar to what is available for Cisco VoIP? If so, we would certainly entertain looking at something of that nature.

Thank You…

My suggestion would be to use an panel which can perform the mentioned tasks.
You can use :
sourceforge.net/projects/monast/

all of this panels can monitor all extensions in real time to originate, transfer and hangup calls, manage queues.
So you can set all calls firstly come in queue and receptionist using this panel can transfer a call on free agents.

PS: that’s my vision , I hope it will at least direct you to right direction.
Jox.