[asterisk-users] Administering phones

[Hiers, Richard]

I'm new to asterisk, currently working through Asterisk, The Definitive Guide.  I have a couple Grandstream 200 phones and a Polycom 501 to play with.  The Grandstreams were very easy to configure, but the more capable Polycom almost drove me crazy.  There is so much conflicting information on the web about necessary config files and names of those files.  Anyway, all my phones are now working on a basic level, but it occurs to me that once spend a lot of time learning Asterisk, I might then have to spend an equal amount of time figuring out how to configure the phones.  The polycom phone, for example, has very large configuration files with a myriad of options.  The manual for this phone alone is over 300 pages.

So my questions are, what phones do you recommend, are there recommended sources for training on said phones, or in general, what advice do you have for configuring phones the phones themselves?

And a related question, we currently use 3Com NBX system where everything is configured via a gui, phones and all.  I don't yet know if I will want to run asterisk with a GUI, but if I do, are there any options for configuring phones through a GUI?

Thanks much

Richard Hiers
Director of IT Services
Covenant Theological Seminary


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