My company is looking at replacing Cisco Communications Manager with FreePBX or another Asterisk platform.
One thing that will be required is to dynamically map and change a phone’s location for E911 purposes. Our Headquarters is in Chicago and Illinois requires E911 zones for every floor and/or 20000 sq. feet. We are currently doing this with Cisco Emergency Responder and doing ERL mappings based on Switch Memberships. Each switch port is assigned to one of our ERLs and the switches communicate with CER via SNMP. when a phone connects to a switch and the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) updates the information the switch sends that information to CER which update’s its database. If that phone moves, or they log in to a different phone then we do not have to manually update the information.
Is this functionality currently available with FreePBX? I am not seeing anything in the documents currently to see that it is.
Not per se, in that the implementation of this particular feature is handled at the Extension. There should be an Emergency Caller ID for each of your extensions which you should be able to accomplish this with.
This discussion has actually come up a few other times. IIRC, the existing features in FreePBX 13+ should be able to get you very close without a lot of extra work.
Of course, if you find that the system’s method is unacceptable, you should please come back here with specific problems and we’ll be more than happy to brainstorm solutions for you. Sooner or later, lots of other people are going to end up in this same boat, so getting it better through an iterative process could be a big win for everyone.
