So a feature we have been toying with internally here is the idea of letting you the PBX admin control what options are displayed in the Phone LCD of the Sangoma Phones with a new feature in End Point Manager. I know lots of admins in the past 5 plus years why phone manufactures don’t let you have better control over a non admin user level login to the phones Web GUI and LCD menu system.
What this means is you would have the ability to create a User Login for the Phone LCD and Web GUI that is different then the admin login. You then can control every option that is displayed to the User level login for the LCD and Phone web GUI. For the User level login you would be able to decide for each option if you want to hide the option or display the option and if you display the option is it a read only option or a changeable option by the user.
How important is this feature for you guys and would it be something we should invest in and would it lead you to buy more Sangoma phones?
I’m an edge case, but I can really see the advantage of being able to control what my users can and can’t update on their phones. Integrating it into FreePBX would make good sense from an “extended functionality” perspective as well. The only downside I can see is tightly integrating FreePBX and your phones might give the impression that you are cutting the rest of us out of your system.
While integrating these more closely and extending the user functionality is great, the creation of a category of second class citizens (everyone that isn’t using Sangoma phones) might make you look like Microsoft and their “adoption” of LDAP as Active Directory.
Now, if you could figure out a way to make that functionality extensible, you might have something in commercial EPM that would make it more attractive. Adding a way for additional systems to implement similar functionality would do two things: 1) it makes the activity more of a case of enlightened self-interest and 2) make it so that other vendors will want to adopt FreePBX as the interface for their phones as well.
In my own version of enlightened self-interest, making an EPM structure like this available for Cisco phones in Skinny mode would be awesome - allowing users to select their ring-tones and retrieve their voice mail from UCP while in Skinny mode (under Chan-SCCP-B, for example) would be really interesting. Implementing it as a hook structure like what we talked about in Asteriskinfo would work well and provide you with a way to offer support to other vendors, easing their cost to integrate.
You are missing the point here. This permissions in our phone is for the phone LCD. Its not something we could do for other manufactures as its something we are building in our phones and just exposing in EPM the ability to set and modify the permissions of what they can do in the phone. Them being your end users with the phones on their desk.
In the end we can only control the software in our phones and no other phone manufacture. For 8 years now most phone manufactures have not taken us and our suggestions serious which is why we went and built our own because our users want that tight integration.
Sorry but this has been covered over and over about comparisons to other phones in threads. We are not going through this again but to say they are our own designs and our own software with all of the advanced features that you dont get in other phones.
Dear Tony,
We receive many requests from big companies that management of users is hard or some cloud service provider that offer their ip phones. So this makes a big chance for Sangoma ip phones in the market.
For me there are only 2 things people want to change in their phones. Either by web gui or lcd, and that’s BLF keys and local directory. The problem with both of these is that I need them to live through a re-provision. For me this option would mean giving the user the ability to add or remove a BLF key (and a BLF key only, no other DSS key). And it pushing that info back to the UCP for EPM.
Same with local directory, if you could somehow store that info in the EPM.
Which I guess brings me to my greater point, it does me no good to be able to create a user login that gives them defined controls, if any changes they make are going to be blown out at my next provision.
I didn’t mean to start up a firestorm here. The point I was trying to make was “this sounds terrific, and as a proof of concept, making the things that people need to access updatable by API-style hooks would be fantastic.”
I’m not asking for Sangoma to take responsibility for the entire world’s user experience or every phone manufacturer’s configuration - I’m saying “give us a way to connect to making the experience better.”
To reiterate - you guys are doing a great job and this is going to be a terrific addition for Sangoma phone users. Making it so that the rest of us can play with the “big dogs” would be a welcome addition to the system.
The problem is all the options for what a user can do in the LCD and GUI is 100% dependent of each phone manufacture settings and options so would not be very easy to make it hookable especially in a commercial module. Now someone comes along and tries to implement a custom change for lets say Cisco phones and it breaks stuff since its a commercial module they call us expecting free support on a paid product. Sorry but its just way to complicated of a thing to try and add support for other manufactures. This whole thread was in regards to Sangoma Phone users and if they see value in this.
That is called, ‘Value Correction’ ?
and has no help text…
and is ON by default (or I don’t remember turning it on)…
(as of EPM v 13.0.61, free-for-Sangoma license only)
one of the few things i like about polycom phones is that they have the ability to send changes made by the user back to the phone system where they are stored in separate files which get reloaded on a reboot. i don’t think the epm supports this but the capability is there and works. so when a user adds someone to their local directory or adds a speed dial the changes live over not only a reboot of the phone but survive even if the phone is factory reset. perhaps sangoma might want to think about implementing a similar feature?
Yes I agree some people like that and other hate it. We took the ground of allowing those changes in EPM through the UCP. That way they are using a GUI and everything is saved in the DB and survives a factory reset plus the admin of the PBX can see all their changes from EPM and override anything a user changed. We feel this method achieves the same thing but a better user experience.
what you are proposing will of course work but it will be a change in how people work with their phones. it becomes a training issue and in a mixed phone environment will lead to questions and more work for the administrator. i am not saying this is the wrong approach but i am suggesting that the entire administrative process gets thought through. for example, when a person leaves and a new person is assigned to a phone, in today’s world you simply change the name, reset the voicemail password to default, possibly setup voicemail to email and in voicemail admin delete all recordings and stored messages. will there be an admin interface to both edit as well as delete user entered data without having to log into UCP?
Yes that is my point. In EPM you can see all the custom changes made by each user and a button to restore back to template defaults. That is the whole point. Otherwise you have users doing things in a phone GUI or LCD and its very hard to know what they have changed for example on a Polycom Phone. With our setup its all in UCP and inside EPM admin under Extension Mapping if a user has changed anything through UCP you will get a icon and if you click on that it will show you all changes they made and let you revert any change or wipe all changes.
I think this would be a great idea myself. I’d also like to be able to change the home screen on the phone to not display time and date: I’m fed up of people telling me that the time is wrong on their handset.
