New presence integration

Ok, today I want to show you the new cool presence functionality we built into our phones. I will focus on the snom820 as presence is simply cooler in color than in b/w. The presence features work on snom370 and snom360 as well, but there are some limitations (less icons, b/w, not the full functionality may be supported so buy 820s :) ).

The Idle screen:

First new thing you will notice is, that on the idle screen you can see your own status. (The first account is my OCS account Tim Koehler and the second one is on our old legacy SIP PBX). The Icon beside your OCS account will change accordingly to your status.

This is the idle screen when I'm available.

This is the idle screen when I'm in a Meeting (I love this icon :)

You will notice that we have different presence icons with symbols. We wanted to have real icons to also support B/W icons and we don't want to use possibly copyrighted material. The additional benefit is, that you can see the difference between Busy, In-a-call, In-a-meeting etc. through the icon.

The contact list:

The contact list also comes with live presence and also updates itself if you change it on Communicator (it usually only takes 1-2 seconds to show the changes you made in Communicator). The picture shows a contact list "testuser" I set up to get all the presence states we can show. I replaced the usernames with the presence state. To browse through your contactgroups you just have to press left or right on the silver navigation button.

You might notice that the first entry is busy (this comes up if you are on a lower access level and the other user does not allow you to see more detailed presence information.

News from the lab since the last Release

Since the first "snom OCS edition" Release 8.2.5 we haven't stopped working. So many things are happening, it's getting difficult to get them all together.

I'm not sending these builts to the whole "snom OCS edition" distribution list, which grew recently over 400 tester/users. The reason is, that I could send a version on a daily basis, beside people starting to complain about spamming :), it would make my job much harder as we need to support too many different versions.

Of course if you find anything interesting in the list below, let me know and I can send you the latest snapshot.


Ok now here the things we managed to achieve on new features:

• Large Certificate Support (up to 4096Bit):
  Up to now (including the Release 8.2.5) we could only support 1024 Bit certificates, we expanded the support to up to 4096 bit certificates, this means you don't need to exchange your certificates on your Frontend/EDGE Servers.
  

• Presence Integration & enhanced contact list:
  The engineers really did an excellent job on this one. Basically there are four new aspects to presence/contact list.
  
  • Contact List display
    We can display the contact list with real name (no more short versions), sorted by Groups (which you can easily navigate with "left/right" on the navigation key). Plus we can also show the contacts details (like phone numbers, away message, etc.). This should make it easy to contact people easily on your contact list.
  • Showing Presence from your contacts onscreen
    The phone will show the presence of your contacts on the screen, this looks pretty good on the snom820 (due to color) but it also works on snom370 and limited on the snom360 (only 3 different states).
  • Showing presence on line buttons
    You can also map the presence on the LED-line keys of the phone, again snom820 is far ahead as it has multi-color LED's, but on the smaller units it helps to see if someone is available with a quick look on your "busy-lamp-field". (At the moment, the the LED, turns on as soon as someone is NOT available, the Button next to the LED can be used as quick dial button). The good thing about this is, that it is a widely known feature your users are used to, if you have an old IP PBX, you could even mix the BLF functionality with OCS :).

  • Manage your own presence on the phone Beside the automatic "machine state" (where your availability decreases over the time if the phone is the only logged in device), you now can set your presence state manually. - Sorry this was a misunderstanding, this feature will come soon :)
    

  
  Stay tuned, I'll add an article showing these new features (including screenshots) later this week.
  
  Please note: The presence functionality will only be available to snom360 (limited), snom370, snom820 and snom MeetingPoint (limited).
  
  
• GUI branding
  On snom820 we now offer the possibility to completely customize the GUI of the phone, e.g. make the GUI in your company colors, etc. (on snom3xx series you can brand the idle screen via XML, see: http://wiki.snom.com/Idle_Screen). Here a simple example:
  
  
  

But we did not only work on new cool features but also on fixing bugs, here the list of things we've been fixing lately:

• snom300 can render into a not boot able state on some phones with Version 8.2.5 - fixed
• LDAP on snom300 and snom320 is not working correctly - fixed
• MeetingPoint looses audio after 10 min over mediation server (due to SRTP) - fixed
• Director issues (local loop detected on call) - fixed
• some dialplan issues - fixed
  
• machine state was interfering with presence showed by communicator - fixed
• some ICE issues - fixed
• + some minor things

Stay tuned as I will add more stuff this week, please participate in the poll for features on the top right.


Cheers

Tim

Welcome to the "snom OCS edition" Blog

Dear customers, partners, friends,


I was thinking a lot about how to keep you informed on the edge without sending out emails every week. We all know that this quickly gets annoying, so I came up with blogging.

I want to inform you about interesting things in the "snom OCS edition" environment, this should contain stuff we're working in our labs, customer experiences, hints for configuration, etc.

My hope is that many of you start following this blog and comment on the development to give me a better feeling on what is going on in the marketplace.

Cheers

Tim