Full phonebooks on desk phones and DECT – is “mobile number only” still intended?

[t.quitsch]

Hello 3CX team,

We use 3CX with Yealink desk phones (including the T85W) and a Yealink W80 DM. Like many people here in the forum, we keep running into the well-known behavior: only the mobile number of each contact is sent to provisioned phones. Contacts that only have a business number are missing on the phone entirely, and business and home numbers never arrive at all.

Your support team described it in the community like this: “For all the hardware phones supported, only the Mobile field from 3CX is sent to the phonebooks.” Elsewhere it was said that this was the original design, because phones used to be able to store only one number per entry.

Our question: Is this behavior still intended today? Or could it be changed in an upcoming update, for example as an option in the management console?

We think the effort is small, because all the building blocks already exist:

1. The data is already there. All five number fields (Mobile, Mobile 2, Home, Business, Business 2) are stored in the phonebook table. The 3CX apps and the web client already display them.
2. The files are already generated. 3CX already writes a phonebook per vendor today (yealink_phonebook.xml, fanvil_phonebook.xml, snom_phonebook.xml, gigaset_phonebook.xml, as well as the new dynamic shared_<MAC>.xml files). Only the loop that outputs one number per contact would need to iterate over all populated number fields.
3. All current phones understand multiple numbers per entry. The vendors’ official formats already provide for this:

Yealink
(official remote phonebook format, also used by W70B/W80 DM):

<DirectoryEntry>
<Name>Peter Müller</Name>
<Telephone label="Business">+493012345</Telephone>
<Telephone label="Mobile">+491711234567</Telephone>
<Telephone label="Home">+4930777</Telephone>
</DirectoryEntry>

Gigaset N670/N870
(the fields already exist in the format):

<entry surname="Müller" name="Peter" office1="+493012345" office2=""
mobile1="+491711234567" mobile2="" home1="+4930777" home2="" />

Snom D series
(MASTER/member as described in the Snom wiki):

<item context="" type="MASTER" fav="false" mod="false" index="0">
<first_name>Peter</first_name><last_name>Müller</last_name>
<number>+493012345</number>
</item>
<item context="" type="none" fav="false" mod="false" index="1">
<first_name>Member_Alias</first_name><last_name>+493012345</last_name>
<number>+491711234567</number><number_type>mobile</number_type>
</item>

Snom DECT M300/M400/M900:

<item>
<first_name>Peter</first_name><last_name>Müller</last_name>
<number idx="1">+493012345</number><number_type idx="1">work</number_type>
<number idx="2">+491711234567</number><number_type idx="2">mobile</number_type>
</item>

Suggested implementation: an option “Send all phone numbers to phones”, off by default so nothing changes on existing systems. Where the format allows it, the number type could be added as a label. The logic is the same for every vendor: go through the populated fields in a fixed order, skip empty fields, and strip spaces and special characters from the numbers. Only the output differs per vendor.

Our workaround: Until then we use a script that builds on the bash scripts from the German thread Telefonbücher für Gigaset und Snom – Workaround. There is a PowerShell version for 3CX on Windows and a bash version for 3CX on Debian, and both produce identical output. The script reads the company phonebook and creates complete phonebooks for Yealink, Fanvil and Snom (desk phones and DECT). We then point the templates to these files. I have attached both scripts, and you are welcome to use them as a starting point. (Attachments: Make-3CXPhonebooks.ps1, make_3cx_phonebooks.sh)

We are aware that direct database access is not supported by you, and that template changes can be lost during updates. That is exactly why an official solution would be the cleanest one for everyone.

Thank you for looking into this, and best regards