SIP Phone (with Speed-Dial) Recommendation?

liamo

Hi,

I'm giving a friend a dig out with an Asterisk installation for his company. One of his requirements is that all the phones should have speed-dial functionality.

The difficulty is that he wants :
a) to be able to centrally manage the speed-dial numbers
b) to scroll though the speed-dial descriptions (not numbers) on the phone.

I had initially thought that I'd simply set up 2 or 3 digit speed-dials and let Asterisk take care of the rest but requirement b above knocks that on the head.

I'm thinking that there must be a few phones that have speed-dial functionality built-in and that can be updated in some kind of "push" fashion. I don't mind writing a script to send a http post to a list of IP addresses, if that's what it takes.

I haven't been able to find such a phone by trawling through Google search results, so if anyone has any recommendations I'd be most grateful.

Thanks

Liam

aaronc

The Cisco and Polycom phones can both have their directories updated via an XML file. In fact the Cisco's will pull the list down from a URL each time you press the Directory button, not sure if the Polycom's do the same but they probably do.

These phones are cheap and not particulalrly easy to operate but they are very good quality and are worth it if they are going into a heavy usage environment and there is some good IT support around. And they will satisfy your requirements of having a scrollable directory.

hth

Aaron

liamo

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for the pointers. Both Cisco and Polycom look promising. While checking them out, following a link brought me to Snom phones. Snom have recently entered into a strategic partnership with Digium and their 320 and 360 phones have "completed interoperability validation with Digium's Asterisk Business Edition" (which is what is being used in this case). It also supports "100-number onboard address book (to which data may easily be uploaded)".

So that's a few products which appear to have the functionality I need. Now to check them out in more detail. When I'm done, I'll post the results of my research, my recommendation to my friend and the method for uploading the configuration to the preferred phone.

Thanks for the help.

Regards,

Liam

TimTim

Be careful if you are going to go down the Cisco route, alot of their business phones run SCCP instead of SIP.

I'm not sure if the directory is present in the SIP firmware and don't bother trying to get chan_sccp and Asterisk working together, I could never get it to work correctly for me.

sirlinux

aastra phones are nice, and good quality, they also do xml for the phonebook feature you are looking for, the 480i has a big screen making it easy to use.

joePC

If your using * why don’t you setup click to dial functionality e.g. everyone has the default phone list which can be added too via a web front end.

Or to a lesser extent Outlook integration.