[Asterisk-Users] Analog Phones with Status Light Indicators

[Adam Goryachev]

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 20:42, Steven Critchfield wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 06:17, Jeremy Lowery wrote:
> > I am currently a new asterisk user and new to telephony in general. I 
> > have been looking around to implement a solution with asterisk that has 
> > many of the nice features of a proprietary PBX for a small office. The 
> > features that I am looking for that I haven't been able to find any 
> > information on are:
> > 
> > - status light indicators for which incoming line in ringing
> > - status light indicators for which lines are currently in use
> > 
> > Basically any information on phones (analog preferred or hard VoIP)  
> > which have status light indicator buttons that can be made to function 
> > with asterisk.
> > 
> > Is this possible, and has anyone set up a phone system with these 
> > features using asterisk? If so, what phones were used and what kind of 
> > special configuration is required?
> 
> You are looking for line occurences/apperances.
> 
> Your problem is that in the analog world, to get those line apperances
> you have to wire every line to every phone. Not very efficient, nor
> practical, nor does it scale to a large number of phone lines. Plus on
> some circuits, lines are not relavent, such as a PRI. 

However, it might be relevant to be able to:

a) program 5 lights on each phone to display the status of the 5
extensions of people in your 'group'.

b) program a number of lights on each phone to display the number of
people in a specific queue (ie, each light represents a 'position' in
the queue).

> Under asterisk, you are encouraged to use extensions. Extensions are
> flexible and scaleable. Your 3 line phone system now can scale up to 2
> or 3 PRI without making major changes to user behavior. You will not
> find a phone system with a T1 worth of indicator lights in a price range
> for every persons desk, You wouldn't want a phone with enough
> lights/buttons to access 3 T1s worth of phone lines.

Unfortunately I have this situation:
Another supplier proposing an NEC phone system where the phones have 16
programmable keys for Direct Station Selection (DSS)/Busy Lamp Fields
(BLF) or Feature Access.

AND

The customer 'must have' a number of those DSS/BLF's, where must have
seems to be around 4 to 5. So, I would absolutely love to be able to do
this with some VoIP hardware phone such as the polycom IP600 or even a
cisco 7960.

> So before you hamstring your small office into having unnecessary
> growing pains as it expands at some time down the road, think about the
> nicer, larger PBX solutions. 

True, but would still be nice to see the status of the people around
you/in your team. How can I offer any sort of comparable/competitive
system without this??

Regards,
Adam