[Asterisk-Users] The Joys of ADSI

[Jayson Vantuyl]

Hey Everybody,

You may remember be as the one that was generally running in circles
trying to get ADSI phones to work?

Well, five phones later, I've got a phone and a code that works to
program it.

I have been discouraged from just posting it to an e-mail forum, but I
have been encouraged to get it embedded in the program.  Is this
possible?  How should it be done?

Next, after getting it working, I've been streamlining my programming
process (I actually trigger * to call each phone, play a brief message,
program the phone, play another message, and hangup--very friendly).  In
doing so, I've been fighting with the program to some degree.

Specifically, I've been generally modifying the asterisk.adsi example
from CVS with the CVS source.  In doing so, the phone does not seem to
be getting the IDLE event, therefore I can't seem to set any text on the
phone when it is on-hook and idle.  Am I doing this wrong?

Voicemail ADSI support needs to be revisited (I've done some basic
patching myself).  Perhaps it has something to do with my phone, but
there are a number of things that are troublesome or don't work.  These
newer Aastra phones seem to *ALWAYS* ask before updating (so updating
the voicemail scripts requires some cryptic actions by the user and
happens every time you check voicemail!).  The programming step takes
long enough that users complain.  The password prompt doesn't display
the softkey for Enter or allow # through (although one-line tweak of the
code makes that work).  Once in the voicemail, the softkeys won't
display (the main menu displays iff you use # instead of the Enter
softkey to confirm your password!).  Most annoying, the security code
for the phone is currently hard-coded into the source (requiring an ugly
source hack to even use this).  Is it possible to put an option in
voicemail.conf to disable ADSI (for those who don't have time to deal
with it)?  How about FDN and SECURITY options?  Is there any way to only
upload the scripts when needed?

Finally, is this the right venue for this sort of problem?  Does this
need to go to asterisk-dev?  If I code some of this do I have a
reasonable chance of expecting integration (if the patches are clean)?
Would it be helpful if I put some documentation in the ADSI code?  Also,
who knows enough about ADSI to seriously help me understand some of the
inner meanings of states, subs, events, and such?

Jayson Vantuyl
Computing Edge, Inc.