asterisk users - Oct 2007 - Cisco 79xx logon/logoff

Hi All,

I'd like to know if anyone has figured out a way to be able to have
users logon/logoff manually from Cisco 79xx phones (with SIP firmware
loaded)?
Scenario is, user walks into office, sits at a random desk, and logs
onto the phone. The system would need to "log them off" of the last
hardphone they were on, and then configure the new phone for their
extension.

We're creating hotdesks and it would be good if users could logon/logoff
the desk phones.

At present they all use softphones on the PC too, and I could engineer a
way of maybe doing things via cgi scripting, replacing the tftp config
files for that phone, and then remotely resetting the phone, however
that would be quite clumber sum.
And before I go that route, I wondered if any of the commercial A*k
systems already offer this?

If the Ciscos can't do this.. then can any other hardphones?


Adrian Marsh

On 10/25/07, Adrian Marsh <Adrian.Marsh at ubiquisys.com> wrote:
> I'd like to know if anyone has figured out a way to be able to have
> users logon/logoff manually from Cisco 79xx phones (with SIP firmware
> loaded)?
> Scenario is, user walks into office, sits at a random desk, and logs
> onto the phone. The system would need to "log them off" of the
last
> hardphone they were on, and then configure the new phone for their
> extension.
>
> We're creating hotdesks and it would be good if users could
logon/logoff
> the desk phones.
>
> At present they all use softphones on the PC too, and I could engineer a
> way of maybe doing things via cgi scripting, replacing the tftp config
> files for that phone, and then remotely resetting the phone, however
> that would be quite clumber sum.
> And before I go that route, I wondered if any of the commercial A*k
> systems already offer this?

I haven't done this with Cisco specifically, but I have done it with other
hardphones.  I didn't go the route of updating the phone's config while
the
person was at that desk because I didn't have a reliable way to remotely
restart the phone.

Instead, I gave each phone an extension and dynamically created links in
ASTdb between the person's extension to the phone's extension for the
duration of the login session.  All the hot desk phones are in a context
that when nobody is linked to that desk only allows you to logon and do
basic things like call the operator and emergency services.  If a user is
linked to the desk, then I do a
Goto(proper-context-for-that-user,${EXTEN},1), which gives me dynamic
contexts for outbound calling without having to have my sip users in
realtime.

The downside to this approach is MWI, but all of my users get voicemail via
email with delete-on-send enabled, so I just kind of sidestepped the issue.

I'm not sure if you're specifically asking about using the softkeys to
do
this without going through some kind of IVR application; worst case you have
speed-dials to your logon/logoff extensions.  You could even save a key by
having a single logon/logoff extension that changed its behaviour based on
whether a link exists for that desk.  Then again, if someone forgets to log
off it might be easier for users to have a dedicated 'logoff' button
rather
than having to press the dual-purposed key twice.

Hope that gives you some ideas.

-- 
j.
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