I need a solution to showing out of office on the blf key. Meaning, if they hit DND, instead of showing red on the BLF, change state to off. I am using yealink. Is this possible or a similar solution?
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When you are BLFing an extension, you’re really watching the state of the device not the user. It’s going to tell you the state of the extension/device such as In Use/Busy or Not In Use/Available or Ringing. The device is never out of the office, the user is. So when you’re looking to watch users you are referring to Presence.
That is going to require you to BLF the user’s Presence hint but I’m not sure BLF is right for that. That would be something more of a Buddies/Contact thing so you might want to look at how the Yealinks handle buddies/contacts vs the states of the device. Because unlike like a device with roughly three states it will monitor, Presence has multiple states. Available, Away, DND, Chat Only, Extended Away and should show those states or a custom state you make. Presence generally has a “extended message” allowing for a custom message to be added. So you could have “Extended Away” state with the message “On Vacation”.
Devices and users are two different beasts when it comes to this.
I am more looking for the light to be off because we are using the EXP40. Basically so the receptionist will no hes not in the office. Maybe Zulu is an option for this?
It may but again you are looking for the Presence of the user. Being a watcher/subscriber of the device is just going to give you the device’s state. When you put the phone in DND that automatically means “Busy/In Use” and the phone is going to react to that state accordingly.
So while Zulu may have something in regards to its softphone clients they would be using the Presence to show that your user is out of the office not the actual extension.
We keep having these “I want my phone BLF LED to do X when Y happens.” These are phone level things and it is completely up to what the phone itself can support. There are standards that they follow in regards to things like BLF and none of them consider making colors different or if X condition is met blink five colors.
When it comes to the Yealinks and setting the link key to BLF it will do things based on the state of the phone/extension it is monitoring.
Solid green → The monitored user is idle.
Fast-flashing red (200ms) —> The monitored user receives an incoming call.
Solid red —> The monitored user is busy. The monitored user’s conversation is placed on hold (This LED status requires server support).
Slow-flashing red (1s) —> The call is parked against the monitored user’s phone number.
Off ----> The monitored user does not exist.
That’s straight from Yealink’s manual and that is exactly the extend of what BLFing a phone/extension will do. Off means there is no user being watched. Unfortunately after looking at their manual there’s not much that can be done with Asterisk due to how Asterisk handles subscriptions/watchers/presence.
I’m not really sure you’re going to get the desired result with the Yealinks.
flashing would work. How do I tell DND to flash then?
You don’t. I’m not sure how much more clear I can be on this. That is a limitation of the PHONE. I provided you the details straight from the Yealink manual of what a BLF line will do based on the state it is provided. To make the BLF line’s LED blink it needs to be RINGING from a call or it needs to see that the phone parked a call and it’s holding in a parking slot.
You are still trying to monitor the status/availability of a user/person by the state of their phone. That is not how it is done. A user can be unavailable but their phone can still be available to accept calls. A user can be sitting next to their phone and when they make it DND it means they don’t want calls to disturb them but they may be OK with Chat or email or other methods of communication.
There is nothing you can do with DND or the BLF of the device to make it do something magically because the user of the device is out of the office for a week. Their phone is at their desk, all DND is going to do is stop it from having calls sent to it as to not annoying anyone that might be in the area with a phone that keeps ringing for 30 seconds each call and never answered.
go ya. Someone said we could use ZULU for presence for out of office, but I haven’t looked into that yet
You might be able to because Zulu should have the ability to look at both the device’s hint (SIP/exten or PJSIP/exten) and the Presence hint for it. Because those are two different things.
exten => 100,hint,PJSIP/100&Custom:DND100,CustomPresence:100
So your BLF is looking at the hint for PJSIP/100 and what you want is the hint for CustomPresence to show the user status. I’m going to guess the Zulu looks at both.
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