[jharrell]

We just purchased 3cx along with Polycom 670 phones after testing with Grandstream 2010's and find their sound quality and reliability lacking. Everything is working great 3cx is functioning well and integrating much better into our CRM than our old system, and the Polycom's sound amazing and are extremely customizable and flexible with the built in microbrowser and very reliable so far.

We would like better support for all the Polycom's features and since it was mentioned 3cx would like to work more closely with Polycom, so I thought I would list everything we have found so far that is lacking:

1. Polycom presence/BLF. We are living without this key feature right now only because the 3cx Assistant somewhat makes up for it, but having to rely on the users PC when the phone has the ability is not a long term solution.

2. Server based DND. Polycom seems to have a option for the DND key to be server based, from what I can tell this only works with Broadcom. We are currently experimenting with remapping the DND to a *61 speed dial and having a *60 "Available" soft key, this is better but still clunky, at least if 3cx flip flopped Away/Avail on *61 or perhaps a special flipflop dailcode, the user could toggle their status with one key.

3. This relates to #1 and #2 and is not Polycom specific, although Polycom seems to have more presence statuses than ringing/busy. But having away/available affect phone BLF seems like an obvious omission, but when we where testing the Grandstreams with working BLF we noticed 3cx does not notify the phone when someone goes away, only ringing and busy.

4. Reject call handling. Polycom sends a 603 Decline response when the reject softkey is pressed on an incoming call, 3cx does not route this to VM like a 486 response. I know there is some debate about whether 603 is a correct response, but most other softpbx's seem to just accept this and route to VM.

5. Polycom directory management. Currently 3cx writes out a 000000000000-directory.xml for Polycom phones, this directory is only picked up when a new phone is initialized, after that the phone looks for a specific [mac-address]-directory.xml and even attempts to "put" this back to the provisioning server when a user edits their directory on the phone. This directory also has speeddials and buddywatch flags which could be very specific to the extension. I have seen some scripts to try and merge a master directory with a phone's directory to keep it up to date, it would be ideal if 3cx could manage this instead.

[instantexpert]

Agreed 100%. I'd also love to have a pony*.

Leon
*Pony in this instance would refer to the awesome feature of having a Polycom application which utilizes the large but largely useless screen on the Polycom phones.

[jharrell]

With the idle screen browser that can be set to auto refresh and the full screen browser when you hit the applications key, we are already using the "mostly useless" screen.

For instance we have the Idle browser refresh every 60 seconds showing our company logo and the status our CRM system such as new unreviewed items in the queue such as support emails and voicemails. If there is an emergency request in the queue the logo switches to a "red alert" on all phones.

The full screen browser has our customer contact phone directory that is queried right of the CRM system.

Other things we will probably do include having the the idle screen switch logos to something that denotes your extension is "Away" in 3cx to make up for no server based DND. Also maybe the application home screen showing a list or graphic of everyones presence to make up for no BLF.

Maybe even generate graphs server side of various company activities for a "dashboard" of sort right on the phone.

The possibilities are endless since it's just a web browser, although a very limited one, it does display images and and simple tables and can cause the phone to dial with special hyperlinks.

Hard to say enough good things about these phones, their audio is top notch, including the speaker phone, great build quality, great reliability, and extreme customiziblity.

[instantexpert]

I did some research after my post into the Micro-browser on the phones. I just don't have the development resources to implement something on my own. If I did, I would use the 3CX API to create an extension monitoring APP much like the assistant to detect free/busy and I would create an easier way to park/retrieve calls.

That said, I agree that the phones are very good build quality. My boss doesn't like paying for them but they were one of the very few GB phones available and our specific infrastructure calls for GB phones.

[jharrell]

Yes we didn't want to spend that much on phone at first either, and we really did like the Grandstream phones for their price and features, but reliability was a killer, having to reboot your phone daily does not fly. After trying a Polycom 650 however and seeing how good they sound and how the micro-browser worked, we just decided the phones where so key to our business that it was well worth the extra money and have not been disappointed. Gigabit was also a factor as it allows us flexibility in having a single line for a computer and phone, as we uses GB for a desktop connections.

We are a software development company, so we have the tools and servers available for the browser apps, I threw together the idle screen and company directory together in a day for querying our CRM system in ASP.Net. The 3cx API for presence will be more complicated, if I get some code working to for busy/away I will post it here for Polycom users.

Also the Polycom have a pretty sophisticated macro system too, one of thier examples was call parking. You could hit a softkey and the macro can cause a prompt to enter a park number, then it would send the correct dial code with the digits in the prompt to the pbx to park/unpark. It would however be nice to list the parked calls on screen and pick them up.

[brauscher]

I second this notion, Polycom makes some of the best phones in the business. Please offer better support!

[jharrell]

Just to show what we have done so far with the Polycom Microbrowser and the 3cx server side API in ASP.Net to makeup for no BLF or server side DND:

Idle Browser refreshes every 60sec showing logo, extension status and CRM info:

photo 2.jpg (32.62 KiB) Viewed 2082 times

Live Directory with extension status (Customer contacts goes to full customer directory from CRM database):

photo 3.jpg (34.93 KiB) Viewed 2083 times

Extension screen with dynamic choices to transfer any call your are on to the extension:

photo.jpg (29.17 KiB) Viewed 2084 times

Still working on a call park menu and would really like to set away/available through the ASP.net but the 3cx assistant currently won't update with status if it is set through the API, even though extension is actually updated, so the away/avail soft buttons on home screen are doing *60/*61 currently with a macro to hangup afterward.

[instantexpert]

How much effort went into the development so far and how useful is the functionality in comparison to just using the 3CX assistant? I'd love to implement something like this at my company but am concerned that the development time may exceed the usefulness.

Leon

[jharrell]

What you see was some spare time development since my first post about the microbrowser, probably 8 man-hours.

It is very useful since it actually interacts with the phone directly allowing you to say attempt to do a assisted transfer and if they say no send them to VM, just hit the button right on the phone. Calling an extension or customer just calls the phone, no "makecall" stuff. There is a lot to be said for real buttons right on the phone, everyone is actually using away/available now and not forgetting they are away.

This assistant is great but it's better on the phone IMO, especially one with a screen like the 670.

I got authorization to post the code, so if you want to use it you can use it, replacing logos etc. I would like to get call parking working and clean it up a little first.

[instantexpert]

If you do get a chance to post the code, I would be eternally grateful.

Leon

[jharrell]

Ok, I really wanted to add parking support but simply don't have the time right now, so I will post as-is.

The attached zip contains the ASP.Net web site and the Polycom provisioning files.

polycom_(fw3-04-0061).ph.xml is the 3cx provisioning template that was modified to setup the idle screen and home page along with the enhanced feature key that jumps to the directory page.

000000000000-directory.xml is the base phone directory that contains the speedial entry for the Directory efk. This will not update on exist phones unless you have the directory set to volatile or it is a fresh formatted phone, otherwise you will have to add the directory entry yourself.

phone2.cfg is the provisioning file that disables the DND key and maps the directories hard key to speedial 1, it also sets up the away/available soft keys and enables the efk function. This file could be merged with the 3cx provisioning template, but in our config we use this file as a master.

You will need to put the 3cxpscomcpp2.dll that provides the 3cx API in the bin directory of the website as the attachment was to big for me to include. It can be downloaded here: http://wiki.3cx.com/api/callcontrolapi

If you are running on 64bit windows you will have to config ASP.net for 32bit mode and the 3cxpscomcpp2.dll must use 32bit com inside or something otherwise you will get an error.

I removed our logo and put a dummy one in instead and also removed all connections to our CRM system, so you will need to modify to change or remove the CRM links such as customer directory and unreviewed tickets.

StatusFlip.aspx actually works to flip/flop as extension status from away to available but as I said before it does not update the 3cx assistant when this happens, otherwise I would have mapped the DND key to this as a url instead of away/available softkeys.

I have noticed that once in awhile the pages will error out with a 3cx not connected error. It tends to happen when I am debugging and refreshing the pages a lot, then all phones will get it for a minute or two. I believe I may not be closing connections to the phone system properly on each page or something there may be a limit on concurrent API connection the phone system at once, but the docs are sparse on this.

This is supplied as-is with no warranty and has only been tested on 3cx v7 with Polycom 670's.

Hope this helps, we use it every day and has been very useful.

*edit: Attachment deleted as a newer version is posted later in thread

[instantexpert]

jharrell,

Thanks for posting this! I'll try to do something with it in the next few days. Are you running this on the same server as your 3CX phone system or are you running it on another web server?

Leon

[jharrell]

Yes we run it on the same server and the provisioning template has %%pbx_ip%% variables in place that point the urls to the same server. I believe they need to be on the same server to access the 3cx API. It seems like you might be able to get the API to connect across the network but 3cx has said this is unsupported.

[instantexpert]

I'm not terribly experienced at installing web pages on Windows servers but I think I've run into a problem that I can't solve. When I run "Home.aspx" I get an "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error with the following stack trace:


[NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.]
ASP.transfer_aspx.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) +182
System.Web.Util.CalliHelper.EventArgFunctionCaller(IntPtr fp, Object o, Object t, EventArgs e) +14
System.Web.Util.CalliEventHandlerDelegateProxy.Callback(Object sender, EventArgs e) +35
System.Web.UI.Control.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +99
System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() +50
System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +627



A few relevant points:

-I'm running Windows Server 2008 x64 with this application running in its own pool at 32bit
-I've tried both the dll you suggested to download and the newer dll which is in the bin directory of 3CX v7.1

Obviously, since I don't have the source, I can't debug it and you didn't sign on to provide lots of free tech support. So, if this doesn't strike you as an obvious issue that you want to deal with, I will be perfectly understanding.

Leon

[jharrell]

Looks like you might not be passing the extension number your coming from in the query string, it passes the source extension number along in order to know where to transfer calls from etc. This come from the provisioning template normally, but you can just tack it on by hand for testing. So it should be Home.aspx?ext=100 or whatever your extension number is. Most of the pages need your extension number to function.

These pages don't have very good error handling as you see, and I just noticed have some hackish code, for instance the directory only displays first names unless the name is "Josh" then displays last initial, as we have two Josh's .