[Asterisk-Users] Text labels on incoming call appearances?

[William P.N. Smith]

Hi All,

I'm looking at an Asterix system for a small home office, 3 incoming 
lines and eight phones scattered about the house, probably with a GUI 
wrapper like SwitchVox to help with the administration.  I'm still 
looking at phones, and am getting pretty confused.  It looks like the 
phones have all the features _and_ the PBX has all the features, and 
I'm not sure if I'm buying too much phone for what I want to do.

I'm upgrading from a Venture 3-line KSU-less phone system with 8 
sets, which has the following features that we like:

3 lines
shared directory
paging (all or specific phone)
programmable keys (one for each phone, I can tell which is in use and 
can do individual pages)

I'm thinking that I need four-line phones, but with call appearances 
I'm no longer sure.  Can I do the following with 1-line or 2-line phones:

When line 1 rings, all the phones would display "Home" and the 
CID.  Someone would pick up their handset and be connected to that line.

Then line 2 rings, all phones display "Work" and the CID.  Someone 
picks up and gets that call.

Line 3 rings, all phones display "Fax" and the CID. More of the same.

It's easy to figure out how this works with four-line phones, but 
with 1 or 2-line phones, how can the person select which line they 
want to pick up?  Obviously it's easy to just "give me the line 
that's ringing", but if I want to put one on hold and have someone 
else pick up from somewhere else, or I want to make an outgoing call 
on the "Work" line, how do I control my line selection?

Shared directories is very important to us, I can enter a name and 
number at my desk and use it at any phone.  I don't seem to see this 
as a feature on the phones I'm looking at.  Can this be done by (say) 
reading all the phone's private directories, combining them and 
writing them back to all the phones?

In an ideal world, I could look at _any_ phone and see my voicemail 
indicator, is there a way to put up to four voicemail indicators on 
every phone in parallel?

I'm looking at Linksys SPA-941 or 942 phones, and maybe the Polycom 
IP-501, are there any better ones I'm missing?

Many thanks in advance!

-- 
William Smith w_smith at compusmiths.com
ComputerSmiths Consulting, Inc. www.compusmiths.com