[asterisk-users] SIP 7960 soft key customization?

Robert Lister
Tue, 11 Dec 2007 11:58:06 -0000

On Mon, Dec 10, 2007 at 10:06:02AM -0500, Peter Pauly
wrote:
> Does anyone know how to customize the order of the soft keys on a 7960
> running SIP? All the documentation I could find is CallManager
> related. Specifically, I want to move the transfer function to the
> first set of buttons during a call.

I looked in to doing just that, as users complain that transfer is fiddly.
Conference should be on the second screen since it is used less, but
Transfer is on the second screen, but used all the time.

As far as I am aware, there is no way that these soft keys can be moved.

Oddly, Cisco have addressed this in the 7961, as they appear to have removed
the BlndXfr feature (just use Transfer and then hang up to do the same
thing) but the 7961 runs completely different software to the 7960.

The short answer is: No, it can't be done.

Why? The slightly longer answer:

Note that the Cisco SIP only image does not support XML push, or many of the
more advanced features. (SoftKeyItem, for example does not work.) as these
phones only support an earlier version of the XML SDK (v2) and not v5 like
the 7961, which supports things like start URL. I'm not even sure you could
move a builtin feature with that anyway.

The 7960 / 7961 phones running SIP are good. The interface is nice and clear
and easy use and easy to read, unlike some other handsets. It has great
potential but is spoilt by some annoying foibles like this.

Sadly there appears to be no incentive for Cisco to develop the SIP image as
apart from handset sales, they don't make any money out of it.

As far as I understand it, the SIP image is provided as a piece of fluff
purely to allow customers to roll out Cisco phones on a SIP platform, and
then the dual-boot Universal Application Loader allows migration away from a
competitor's (SIP Based) system, as you just boot the phone up in CCM and it
puts on the right version of software.

If you were a large corporate rolling out 3000 Cisco 7960s but only had one
Ethernet port per desk, maybe you can't have two IP handsets on every desk,
and integrating the two phone systems back-end would be a time consuming
nightmare/expensive just purely to rip it out again a few months later, and
you probably couldn't swap out 3000 handsets overnight, or even in one
weekend. Enter the SIP image to assist in migrating away from the SIP
interface of your old system, to the lovely shiny Cisco CallManager you just
bought.

Of course, you could in theory use the SIP image/dual boot to migrate away
from CCM to a competitor's system, however, what would happen is that users
would lose a whole bunch of functionality they had with CCM that doesn't
exist in the SIP image, and so the new system would be 'worse than the old
one' from the user's perspective.

When you see it like that, you can see that Cisco couldn't really care less
about the little guys running asterisk on their migratory SIP image, which
they only created so they can provide a migration path to big corporates
away from their competitor's systems.

Every so often I think that there must be a better handset out there, and
indeed there are better handsets out there that allow things like call
reject, Busy lamp field etc. (SIP feature-wise the Cisco phones are very
basic.) but the interface tends to be quite complicated/weird compared to
the 7960.

I was very impressed with the aastra, but if I found the interface a
bit too complicated compared to Cisco, the users would have a nightmare!

Rob

--
Robert Lister     - London Internet Exchange - http://www.linx.net/
sip:robl at linx.net - inoc-dba:5459*710        - tel: +44 (0)20 7645 3510