Inexpensive freepbx/asterisk compatible phones

Or just use direct parking.

yes but you are using an extra button for that. On the Grandstream or Yealink just press any park button and the call goes there. no need for the extra park button and you dont have to wait for the park feature to tell you what line its on, just press one.

umm what? Extra line where?

Oh @Randee here is a great reason not to use Cisco phones when you donā€™t know what you are doing.

the BLF with *80, I dont need one on the Grandstream or Yealink.

That is intercom, has nothing to do with call parking. Didnā€™t realize that it would be confusing.

ok, in your example, pressing line 6 would park the call and pressing it again on another phone would pick it up? What model phone? I tried several phones and that only worked on Grandstream and Yealinkā€¦ all others it would only pick up and not park.

That is a Yealink. But it should work with anything cause it is simply a BLF for the specific parking slot.

ok, that is what I was saying. On the yealink and grandstream it works, on other models I have tested you need a different program to park and a BLF to pickup the line. I was not abel to do that on one button with the polycom, mitel, etcā€¦ Depending on the program it would park or pickup, not both.

I have no idea what you tested, but that is not how direct parking works. With direct parking enabled, a default setting since sometime in FreePBX 13 I think, you park a call to a specific slot by transferring a call to the specific parking slot (extension). You pick up a call by simply dialling that extension.

This means that any BLF on any model phone will work to pick up a parked call unless that phone is doing something very abnormal when you press it and the BLF state is showing occupied.

Now some model phones may not blind transfer TO a BLF. I can see that. But that would never affect picking up a called parked via a BLF as long as that BLF is simply dialing the number when pressed.

Have you tried this on a polycom? For a button you have 3 choices, line, BLF, automat. BLF you can pickup a park but cant park a call. Automat you can park a call but cant pick it up, Hence my statement, you need an extra button.

This is not correct at all. First off, the line keys can be Line, BLF, Speeddial, a buddy or blank. So there are more then 2 real options for a line key. You can even tie a macro to a line keep to pull your speeddials or buddies from lists.

Second, with BLF automata it makes the BLF button a speeddial, transfer, and pickup. I have end users doing this where their Parking Lot BLF is BLF automata and they can park/pickup a calll from the lot with a single press of the button. Nothing requires a extra button for this. They can pickup calls ringing other lines with their BLF without an issue.

Depending on how you have both FreePBX and the phone configured and that you are running some of their older firmware that had some BLF bugs in it, this all works fine with a single button.

OK. I am running the latest PBX 14 and under EPM I have the latest firmware selected. I only have 3 options for the buttons and its Line, BLF, Automat. I am assuming you have this setup as Automat but I dont know what to put on the button from there. My parking lot is 71, 72. If I put a 71 on a BLF I can puck up a parked call, if I but 71 on a automat button I can park a call. What do youhave it set to for both? MOre details would be very helpful. When I search on this in the forums (here and polycom) I found many people asking for this and no answers.

They would be Line, BLF, BLF+Transfer (which is automata). You have all the other options set properly? Youā€™re using PJSIP which requires notify_early_inuse_ringing=yes which isnā€™t a setting that is part of the normal endpoint config in FreePBX.

Unlike Chan_SIP where you can go into Asterisk SIP Settings ā†’ Chan_SIP and set these flags globally and it will apply to all Chan_SIP peers. PJSIP doesnā€™t have global settings like that, itā€™s per endpoint. You may have to add this via pjsip.endpoints_custom_post.conf with

[100](+)
notify_early_inuse_ringing=yes

This assumes the endpoint is 100. This will add the setting to the endpoint config to be loaded. Try that and see what happens. Also, the firmware for VVXā€™s in the EPM is highly outdated as Polycom never renewed their partner agreement and thus no new firmware updates have been provided or tested. The firmware that FreePBX has a known BLF bug, you need to be at least on at least 5.8.1 for this to work right. As that is the firmware I am currently running with no issues.

Thank you. I will do more testing. I wasnt sure if I updated the phone if it would downgrade the the firmware version set in EPM or keep the newer one.

Can you not use the ā€œbasefile editā€ functionality to globally add something like this for polycom phones? I do it for Snom and Yealink.

Why would a PJSIP endpoint setting need to be in the EPM? Itā€™s not a phone setting is an endpoint setting at PBX for the endpoint.

Totally misread that.

So I agree with your logic, I first had a Cisco 7961 (cost Ā£18 from e-Bay) and now have a 7964 (6 line colour) which cost Ā£25 on e-bay [both prices included shipping].
They take a little bit of work to configure - but once you realise that there are two different SIP configuration methodologies dependant on the firmware/model - they they work fine.
Compare to some IP phones, they are rock solid, business grade phones.

Compared to other IP phones that arenā€™t EOL or require you to patch Asterisk with a special patch (each Asterisk release) so that you can unlock standard features like BLF, Conf/3-Way call and other features that other IP phones have without any special patching or software?

Yes, compared to having to do nothing to make your phone work having to jump through a bunch of hoops and being stuck on things until the proper patches by a third party are updated itā€™s a great phone.