Endpoint Manager - Polycom - Valet Parking works with button type "automata"

Ok - Coming back to FreePBX/Commercial Endpoint Manager after being away for a while and I have several customers with Polycom Phones (mostly VVX - Some SoundPoints).

I have gotten used to Valet Parking with my hosted providers and I am also used to it working with Yealink and Grandstream phones on FreePBX - And customers EXPECT it to work.

So I am about to take a customer off Hosted and back to an On-Premise PBX and I am trying to make it work on the Polycom’s with Endpoint Manager - You can’t and TONS of posts here will attest to the frustration other people have in trying to make it work - most have given up, or settled for a sucky Park Button and then BLF’s for the various spots and just hoping you know which button you ended up parked on.

Not believing that it couldn’t be done, I looked at the XML of a Hosted Polycom phone that had the feature and the ONLY difference I could see is the attendant.resourceList.x.type=“automata”.

Surely It can’t be that simple - but it is! Here is what a button looks like configured in Endpoint Manager through the Interface on the phone:

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In this config, you can see when someone is parked, but you can’t park there by pressing the button - you get the message “I’m Sorry, but there is no call parked on that extension”

But here is the Magic - Switch the type to “Automata” and the Valet-Parking works PERFECTLY!!!

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No other changes necessary - we just need to be able to select Automata as the button type and we are Golden!!!

Why hasn’t this been added to Endpoint Manager??? This has been a working feature on my Hosted Polycom phones for YEARS NOW!

While I wait for an answer, I am going to try and hack the code for Endpoint Manager and see if I can add this option - This really is a missing feature - if it works everywhere else, it should work in FreePBX!

Ok - I have a Work-Around until they put that Button in Endpoint Manager as an option - I have tried it with a VVX and it works fine - I will have to go to my office and grab a SoundPoint and try it on that one too, but it works perfectly on the VVX’s:

  1. Go into Basefile Edit and pick your Polycom Template and then the model of phone you are trying to edit - You will notice that the Basefile for most of the Polycom’s is the same Basefile - so you will only need to change it once.

  2. I tend to put one Line Key (I haven’t needed more on Polycom…) and then 2 or 3 Park keys - do it to your preference, but since we are hard-coding Keys across multiple models, you need to settle on a consistent template for buttons that won’t screw you up across the phones you have.

  3. Edit the file MAC-Features.cfg and make the changes I have made here - This is with three Valet-Park Spots:

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If you haven’t changed Basefiles before, your changes flow to the bottom of the section they are in and are highlighted in RED so that you can see them - so once you find attendant.resourceList.1.type and change the value, it moves to the bottom of the section - this is normal.

Before you change them, they are set to a template value that is supplied by EPM - we are Hard-Coding them to be automata so that Parking will work.

  1. Configure the phone through EPM as follows:

And there you have it - Working Valet Parking with Polycom phones on FreePBX! As soon as the Sangoma people can fix this, we won’t need this hack, but until then it works great!

Whoops - Missed the Offset for the first Line Key - If you want three Valet-Park buttons and you are using 1 Line key, here is what it should look like:

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Isnt the BLF+Transfer still an option? Because that sets the BLF type to automata for Polycoms. Has for years.

Edit: “normal” = speed dial an idle BLF line
“automata” = blind transfer to idle BLF line

Well booger - Sure enough and without Basefile Edit - Wish that was more obvious somewhere in EPM - I wasted a lot of time on this

One more side-note to this - go here to get it working with VVX phones:

Polycom - Valet Park Retrieval quit working with EPM Update - Commercial Modules / Endpoint Manager - FreePBX Community Forums

The firmware included in EPM doesn’t work as of now (2021-04-02) - That might change in the future.

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