[Asterisk-Users] Extension buttons

[John Todd]

At 7:33 PM -0500 on 4/22/04, David Krider wrote:
>I've downloaded the entire archive of articles and searched through them
>for an answer on this, but I haven't come across one yet. I'm looking to
>replace a small phone system in my church with Asterisk, and I'm stuck
>looking for phones. I know that the staff are going to want a button for
>their commonly-called extensions, but I'm having trouble finding phones
>that have, say, 10 programmable buttons for this sort of thing. I'm left
>to conclude that most phones can do this sort of thing by clicking
>through some combination of buttons. However, it would seem that the
>average price for a nice SIP phone eliminates the possibility of just
>ordering some to find out. Can someone please tell me how this is
>handled in general? For instance, the Polycom 600 doesn't seem to have
>ANY buttons that can be programmed for particular extensions, but I have
>to think it can do so fairly easily. Perhaps these phones are being sold
>primarily for very large business (like my Fortune 500 company) where
>you use a directory for numbers, and have only a few buttons for
>programming. I guess the follow-on question is just to ask: what phone
>would be good for a 12-18 extension office, where people want to quickly
>ring up others because of long walks between the offices?
>
>Thanks,
>dk
>--
>David "Dunkirk" Krider, http://www.davidkrider.com
>Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
>Open Source: Will you use the power for good... or for AWESOME?


(I'll assume you're asking for "line appareances", and not 
"single-button push-dial".  If you're looking for single-button 
push-dial, something even as simple as the 7960 can work for you)

What you're looking for are "line appearances", and no, they're not 
common with SIP phones since the methods to support the presence 
activity on those buttons is a bit of a pain, and still fairly fresh 
off the presses (if off the presses at all.)

The phones that are rumored to support these new methods (I haven't 
any of them in my hands at the moment, so I can't say if they do or 
don't):
   - SNOM 220
   - Sayson 480i
   - Inter-Tel 8620 and 8662
   - not sure about the Polycomm 500 and 600
   - others?

Now, even though some of these phones might actually be shipping, 
that doesn't mean that Asterisk supports line appearances.   There is 
no "SUBSCRIBE" or NOTIFY method that currently exists for SIP phones 
with Asterisk to handle line appearances (though that might not be 
too difficult.)

JT