[Asterisk-Users] Polycom vs. Cisco IP Phones

[C F]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 08:27:17 -0500, Ben Ruset <ben.ruset at verizon.net> wrote:
> 
> > 2. Doesn't handle multiple lines nicely, will not jump to the next
> > line, even if the same SIP registration is used, and you can't disable
> > Call waiting.
> 
> You can most certainly turn off call waiting. That's handled in
> Asterisk. We use AMP, and our configs allow us *70 to turn CW on, and
> *71 to turn it off.
>
What are you talking about? unless I misunderstood you, *70 will turn
off CW on the Polycom phone? How exactly? Is it because you have an
extension in asterisk *70 and *71 that will take care of CW for you
(using setgroup/checkgroup, or any of the other asterisk commands).
That will take care of the problem but will not disable CW on the
phone. Consider this (I'm only doing a 2 line example):
exten => 123,1,Setgroup(${EXTEN}1)
exten => 123,2,Checkgroup(1)
exten => 123,3,Noop("") ; needed b/c of conflict with 2nd line
exten => 123,4,Dial(SIP/${EXTEN}1,30,tr)
exten => 123,103,Dial(SIP/${EXTEN}2,30,tr)
exten => 123,5,Voicemail(u${EXTEN})
exten => 123,6,playback(goodbye)
exten => 123,7,Hangup
exten => 123,104,Goto(123,5)
exten => 123,105,Voicemail(b${EXTEN})
exten => 123,106,Goto(123,6)
exten => 123,204,Goto(123,105)

The above will work around the CW problem (it assumes that the 1st
line on the phone uses a sip account 1231, and the 2nd one uses a sip
account 1232) and also takes care that the multiple lines get
utilized, however it is NOT fullproof, and in no way does it disable
CW on the phone. It is also extremly complicated to do this for six
lines (try adding one command, I know that with the new priorities
it's not so difficult, but I'm not using those).

Now consider this (this works with the cisco 7960, even if you put a
7914 with it, it will still use all 20+ plus buttons this way, if CW
is disabled on the phone):
exten => 123,1,Dial(SIP/${EXTEN},30,tr)
exten => 123,2,Voicemail(u${EXTEN})
exten => 123,3,Playback(goodbye)
exten => 123,4,Hangup
exten => 123,102,Voicmail(b${EXTEN})
exten => 123,103,Goto(123,3)

The above will make the Cisco phone what uses just one sip account
(123) for all it's buttons, to ring the next available button when a
phone call comes in.

> > 3. They don't realy support their phones, unless there is a hardware problem.
> 
> They don't support them with Asterisk, but if you don't tell them about
> it, they tend to be very good at working to resolve issues.
> 
> We have a fleet of IP600s that are doing well. The configs take a little
> bit to wrap your head around, and there are just so many features that
> you can enable or disable that it's a lot of work to tweak them to
> exactly what you may like.
> 
> We're considering having our in-house programmer write some sort of PHP
> app for a web-based config .xml generator.
>