On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 1:01 PM, Nathan Neulinger <nneul@mst.edu> wrote:
Personally I think it's nuts... but we have a number of secretary/admin/receptionist users with Cisco expansion modules that have the shared lines of all of the people in their department on them. (i.e. a 7940/7960 plus the module). Usually with some portion of the other lines set to just flash and not audibly ring. While I'd expect that in most cases they really would be sufficient with busy lamp, sometimes they do use it to answer arbitrary calls for faculty that are out of the office/etc.
With the transitioned cisco phones on FS/mod_skinny - it works the same way, however we're wanting to position ourselves with suitable replacements, particularly for any departments that want more than bare bones functionality.
With the polycom phones, it appears to also work that way where you can have a sip account for every line key if you want - even including the expansion modules.
However, on the Yealink phones (got looking at them cause of the T46G I won at ClueCon) we found the number of accounts very limited.
It turns out that with the latest firmware (73.x) on the Yealink units the count is increased on a number of the models (to 16 on the T46 for example). The problem is that with the middle tier ones that you'd add an expansion module to - it doesn't really get you anything. If your base phone is limited to 6 accounts, adding the expansion module ONLY gets you busy-lamp or speed dials.
We're working on getting the users "converted" to not using full lines wherever possible, but still want options open.
-- Nathan
Thanks for the explanation. I share your feelings about the T46. I love that phone but hate the fact that you only get 6 SIP accounts. (Glad to hear that they added more in a recent firmware - I'll test that out at some point...) If you find a solution other than the Cisco one I would be interested in hearing about it. Thanks, Michael