Monitoring other extensions on all phones

General Help
1

Hi

I really hope I am posting to the correct forum, this has been getting on top of me now and I fear I simply cant see the wood for the trees, so really just need a pointer.

I have a small setup using Freepbx 2.9, 4 extensions and 1 sip trunk. Each extension has a Cisco SPA502g phone.

All this is working wonderfully, however we miss a certain feature that we used to have with our older traditional PBX where we could see at a glance to the phone if another extension was busy or available, so we could either transfer the call to the user or take a message or transfer to VM.

Each phone announces the state of its own phone, but we would like to be able to see the state of the other phones.

I have spent most of the morning thinking it was SLA that we needed, however this appears not to be the case now, and I am currently thinking its BLF we need.

Could someone please explain to me which path to take?

Many thanks for your time.

Tony

2

Yep BLF is what you are looking for

3

Thank you!,

does that work even without the attendant console? The only place I can see any mention of BLF is in the attendant console area which none of the phones currently have

4

SPA502G is a single line phone without and line appearance keys and is not compatible with the operator console.

You may consider selling your phones (or sending them back if you are lucky) and getting Aastra 6731i’s. They provide 8 BLF buttons and the most bang for the buck.

In the Cisco side the SPA 509G has 12 buttons.

5

wow thats a lot of money for a single feature, like i said the system is working perfectly for us apart from this one feature so it would be a shame to do that.

Is there any kind of app that could run in a small window on a pc to show line status? I know about the FOP, but this is a tad large and cumbersome for our small setup.

6

It’s not a single feature, it’s quote a few line appearance buttons one one phone.

The Aastra phones really have great value with 8 programmable keys (that will do BLF) on the low end sub $100 6731i.

The new FOP2 at http://www.fop2.com can easily be customized. You can always add a second monitor to the PC’s for the phones. The little 9" USB monitors are cute for this purpose.