[Asterisk-Users] SIP Phones-Receptionist Setup

[Noah Miller]

> I am looking at placing a system in an office with a central 
> receptionist,
> and phones for each individual employee thereafter.  Could I use a 
> Snom 220
> with additional keypads to view if the lines are in use by the other
> employees?
>
> Fred is in sales... A call comes into the receptionist and they 
> transfer the
> call to Fred.  The receptionist can tell Fred is still on the phone by
> viewing the assigned key on the Snom 220¹s keypad, so if another call 
> comes
> in they know he is on the phone instead of just blindly transferring 
> the
> call and pushing the person to his voicemail.  So they can ask the 
> person
> hold or if them want to be transferred into Fred¹s voicemail.
>
> Any thoughts would be appreciated...  I am new to the list, so my 
> apologies
> if this has been addressed before.

This does seem to be a common request, but I haven't seen any great 
answers yet.  With the Snom phones, you can use the "hint() priority" 
(see http://www.voip-info.org/ and archives of this mailing list) for 
shared lines, but as far as I know, this only applies to sharing all 
the lines across all the extension.  I don't know if it can apply to 
all the extra buttons that are on the Snom 220.  Anybody tried that?

Another option is the Flash Operator Panel, you can see a live demo at 
http://www.asternic.com/  It is a flash applet that you can use in any 
browser that lets you see all your lines and extensions and their 
current state.  You can even do drag and drop call transferring.