I am currently investigating the replacement of our Alcatel system to be purely asterisk based.
One feature of the Alcatel is that on analog extensions instead of a dialtone you get a message played back that ‘Your calls are forwarded’. On digital handsets with a screen you see where your calls are forwarded to along with the audible notification instead of dial tone. With no forward set you get normal dialtone
Our users forward their handsets on/off numerous times of the day and to different people
With my current IP system which is based on IP500 handsets and some WPU-7800 WIFI handsets I can’t see or figure out a way to get any form of notification to the end user that their handset is forwarded once they set it. All my handsets have the ability to set the forward on the phone itself however if the phone gets unplugged the forwarding does not work.
We use Polycom phones and have the same problem. It’s one of endpoint-based forwarding versus server-based forwarding (or do-not-disturb.) There are some hacks you can do with enhanced feature keys to get the two synced up but it’s very fragile. And I don’t know what kind of capabilities such an old phone would have in that regard.
It’s possible Digium or some other phones might be more tightly integrated with Asterisk to do what you want (ie combine server-side and endpoint forwarding) but I haven’t looked at them yet.
FreePBX generates a hint for all extensions with CF enabled so you always have the option to set a programmable button to BLF that hint. It takes the form of the CF toggle featurecode with the extension number, so on my desk phone extension of 103, I can set a BLF to *740103 and it will illuminate when the ext is on CF.
I have no idea how you would go about doing this for Analog extensions or extensions without BLF buttons. The only thing I can think of is to investigate forcing the stuttered dialtone when the CF hint is ‘in use’.
I think it’s just going to be a limitation of the IP500
I have been hunting about for a while now to try and settle on a fully Asterisk compatible handset. Most reviews I have found date to 2008.
Would there be any phones out there that would support this forwarding notification? - I would probably be willing to move away from the IP500 to achieve this.
Any phone that has programmable keys will support this. You can also use the Buddy Watch feature of the 500, if you subscribe to the CF hint you will see if it is forwarded, this requires a lot of user interaction.
The 500’s are very old, Almost 12 years, and non-PoE but they work well.
You could also hack a script together to do the aural notification that was mentioned.