asterisk users - Feb 2004 - Simulating the "lighted line in use" type of phone

I'd like to see if anyone out there might have some ideas on this.

I have a customer who wants to move to VoIP, but who has an office full 
of people who are very conservative about their telephones.

They would like the asterisk system that I am proposing to have 
something analogous to what they have right now, which are plain 4-line 
analog phones with a light showing any lines in use, and a button 
beneath that they press to choose an outbound line.

Before I tell them that this is a silly retrograde behavior I thought 
I'd check first to see how others of you out there might handle this 
same desideratum.

Thanks in advance.

b.

I would put it in a totally different light.  IE; depending on who they use 
as an IAX/SIP carrier, they may have potentially unlimited outbound and 
inbound lines with the limit only imposed by the total number of indications 
on the phones in the office and even then, new inbound calls can still go to 
voicemail or a call queue.

John

Brian Capouch wrote:
> I'd like to see if anyone out there might have some ideas on this.
> 
> I have a customer who wants to move to VoIP, but who has an office full 
> of people who are very conservative about their telephones.
> 
> They would like the asterisk system that I am proposing to have 
> something analogous to what they have right now, which are plain 4-line 
> analog phones with a light showing any lines in use, and a button 
> beneath that they press to choose an outbound line.
> 
> Before I tell them that this is a silly retrograde behavior I thought 
> I'd check first to see how others of you out there might handle this 
> same desideratum.
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> b.
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I have a similar situation,

I have an office with 4 lines that are answered in different names and
wanted to give users the option to see the status of each line etc.

I have some cisco  vip30 with the select buttons and appropriate leds, I
was going to set these up on a * box and see how developed the skinny
driver is as far as making these buttons/leds let the users select
particular lines and indicate status.

The lines are mainly analogue on x100 cards

Maybe somebody has already worked on this and can give some guidance.

The hardware looks like it  will do the job, the only question is if we
can hack the software to do what we want.

craig

-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-admin@lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-admin@lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Brian
Capouch
Sent: Wednesday, 25 February 2004 08:01
To: asterisk-users@lists.digium.com
Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Simulating the "lighted line in use" type of
phone

I'd like to see if anyone out there might have some ideas on this.

I have a customer who wants to move to VoIP, but who has an office full 
of people who are very conservative about their telephones.

They would like the asterisk system that I am proposing to have 
something analogous to what they have right now, which are plain 4-line 
analog phones with a light showing any lines in use, and a button 
beneath that they press to choose an outbound line.

Before I tell them that this is a silly retrograde behavior I thought 
I'd check first to see how others of you out there might handle this 
same desideratum.

Thanks in advance.

b.
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Take a look at my GUI app:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/astguiclient/

It'll run on Linux and Windows, it's written in perl and it'll list
every
channel(Zap/SIP/Local) that is active on your system updated every second.

You can also do a lot of other things with it too.

We've been using it here at my company for months on over 60 computers and
it scales rather well.

MATT---


-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Sailer [mailto:tps@buoy.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2004 4:24 PM
To: asterisk-users@lists.digium.com
Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Simulating the "lighted line in use"
type
of phone


On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 03:49:36PM -0500, Chris Clifton
wrote:
> That's fine for outbound lines, but what if I want to call the guy in
the
> next office ? I have to call him and get redirected to his busy vm just to
> know that he's on the phone.
> 
> This is a huge issue with the recepetionist with the 'master
console'. How
> does he/she know whether a user is busy or not ?
> 
> 20 year old phone systems offer this capability.
> 
> I see this as a serious shortfall of asterisk / currently available ip
> phones right now.
I'm scratching out a way of doing this using the manager port. There is
a TON of info that is passed to the manager port once you are authenticated.
I'd love the interface to be Java (portablilty), but it could be web based
with a short refresh (say 5 seconds) from a database.

Tim

-- 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
>> Tim Sailer                       ><  Coastal Internet, Inc.      
<<
>> Network and Systems Operations   ><  PO Box 726                  
<<
>> http://www.buoy.com              ><  Moriches, NY 11955          
<<
>> tps@buoy.com                     ><  (631) 399-2910  (888)
924-3728  <<
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
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It actually has components that run on the Asterisk server as well as a GUI
app that runs on the desktop(Win32 or Linux).

astguiclient was really designed for a larger environment than most of the
Asterisk client apps that are out there, and it is not as easy to set up. It
was also initially designed for the specific needs of my company.

It needs a MySQL server to be located somewhere that is accessible to the
Asterisk server and the client machines.(I'm thinking I should add a
$MySQL_port variable to the config files so that you can easily change the
MySQL port the server or client apps connect to for those with
"creative"
firewalls)

The reasons that MySQL is used are simple: Scalability and Stability

I figured that out when I tried to have 60 concurrent connections to the
manager port getting updated info on channel statuses and the Asterisk
server quickly slowed to a crawl.

I wrote an application that runs on the Asterisk server to grab channel info
and dump it to the MySQL database so that potentially hundreds of clients
can be running at the same time without impacting the Asterisk server at
all.

Also, if you use the new optional Central Queue System that is bundled with
the latest release, the client app never actually connects to the Asterisk
server, all call initiations, transfers, and other commands are put into a
central MySQL queue table and are initiated locally on the Asterisk server.
But you don't have to use the CQS to have full functionality of the GUI app.

If anyone has any questions about astguiclient just send me an email.

MATT---


-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Thompson [mailto:asteriskuser@aktzero.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2004 5:47 PM
To: asterisk-users@lists.digium.com
Subject: RE: [Asterisk-Users] Simulating the "lighted line in use"
type
of phone

> I looked at it, and it won't work for me the way you have written it
> without me hacking at it. You insist on having MySQL run in network
> mode. I really don't want another port/service running on a box that
> is internet-facing... call me silly. :) For things like this, I'll
> only have the service running locally.    
> 
> Tim
Just because a port is active doesn't mean that the world has to be able
to see it.

I've not used this script(astguiclient), is it intended to be ran from
the client, or from the server?

-----
Andrew Thompson
http://aktzero.com/ 


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