Since I seem to be the only one with an office full of Digium, now Sangoma D80 phones I ask the question again every now and then: When will these be fully supported?
Their firmware seems to be maintained even after Digium sold out to Sangoma and its splash screen now proudly boasts the new name. Alas, was anything else than that changed in the new release? (if someone knows, feel free to point me to a change log;)
I have switched back and forth between DPMA in “Digium Phones” and “Endpoint Manager” several times hoping there would be improvements, let alone a working integration of “Contact Manager” like there is for D40/50/60/65. So far, no luck.
“Digium Phones” puts an XML-File in /var/www/html/digium_phones. The format of that file is well documented by Digium and very powerful. Unfortunately, the frontend in “Digium Phones” won’t even let you enter first and last names separately rendering search capabilities in the phone rather limited (if not useless). You can tweak the file by hand and even enter Gravatar URIs for your BLFs but all that work is overwritten each time you make any change in “Digium Phones”. Thus you have to maintain the files in separate locations and copy them over all the time. Needless to say, maintaining a company wide phonebook that way is a little cumbersome.
Now that Endpoint Manager supports DPMA it is possible to configure the phones with that. The list of extensions to choose from on the phone only shows numbers, whereas in Digium Phones there is also the name. That is a benign problem compared to the fact that there is no possibility for a phone book at all!
Let me stress again that the Sangoma (Digium) D80 is now marketed as their top of the line phone and sold at a premium. It would be great if that would integrate the possibilities of Contact Manager und UCP at some point, as all the “lower” models have done pretty much from the beginning.
I appologize for the lengthy post and kindly ask the devs over at Sangoma (phone firmware is not open source I suspect) to give the D80 some love.
Cheers,
Konrad
PS: Or am I overlooking some config option here and a (phone editable?) contact list appears on the D80 in a jiffy? I’d be most happy to stand corrected.
I set up several freePBX 14 servers with ~7 Digium/Sangoma D65 phones each. They work great, but I preferred the Digium phones module and deactivated the EPM. I configured the phones using the advanced DPMA configuration.
The phones can use the freePBX contactmanager, but you need a conversion script. It should work for the D80 too…you might have to play around with it and adapt it…it won’t let you edit the contacts on the phone though …yet, a cronjob will sync changes in the contactmanager automatically
D65s, lovely! We have a few D60 and D40 (two of each I think); I believe on recent freepbx’ses those work with contact manager when configured via endpoint and even let you edit data on the phone. If only they did that for their flagship phone too. I guess I will stick with the “Digium Phones”-module for the time being and use unix-ways as you said. Cronjob is a great Idea! Or maybe just take write permissions away?
We just need a solution for the short term…
Check Sangomas website…the index page…theres only a Digium phone on the image…it tells you something about the future!
I cant see a Sangoma S-Series phone on the image of the index page
By the way, my phonebook-xml file does not get overwritten. I use the Digium phone module, easy mode switched off and I use separate config files for the Digium phones as described in the Wiki (advanced DPMA configuration).
EPM is/was not good enough…when I bought & tested it several months ago…
