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