I’ve been knocking around with trying to figure out Cisco 7940/7960/7914 Presence over SIP for the past couple of weeks, and I’m coming to the conclusion that everything should be there to start making this a reality. There is an Asterisk patch to sip.c that handles the TCP SIP components of presence on these phones. There are also several components that previously did not exist that are now available in Asterisk 1.8 that should make it so that this could possibly start being a possibility.
Cisco now “supports” the combination of the 7914 and the 7940/60 in SIP (according to the release notes on the latest 7960 software). I say “supports” because I can’t really tell if that’s just marketing input into the notes or if the newest version of the 7960 code actually provide support.
I have found that the configuration for the 7960 is different than the 7961 and 7970, and that lots of people are throwing dialplans and advice around for one without realizing that the configs don’t always work with the other two.
I’m still working out all of the details, but once I have all of the ducks lined up, how tough will it be to add support in FreePBX for the phone/sidecar configuration?