Softphone on top of IP Hard Phone

[IPOUK]

Would love some help/advice from you guys.

We have a site with 5610s - all works fine. BUT they have softphones and want to "take over" their Hardphones in the office.

After lot's of support calls etc, I think Avaya say that a hard phone can't be logged off automatically instead of a softphone - which is not good and really doesn't make sense as the whole idea of IP Phones are that you can log in from anywhere, including softphones.

Anyway, after some lenghty discussions - we have been told that users should have a Base Extn, and then during office hours, use Phone Manager to log in as their user, with login/logout with the base extn ticked. This works fine - logs the phone in on top of the base extn, and when you close PM down, it logs the phone out. Great

But when you go to login as that user for softphone (untick login/logout) it just says user cannot be logged in - that's because the phone isn't logged in of course.

Does anyone have a procedure to get this to work smoothly - and even better, a way that you don't need to have PM running just to get into your phone (if you reboot your PC etc, the phone will log out!!)

Cheers.

 

[IPGuru]

softphone & IP Phones cannot share the same user number.
I would agree that this can be a real pain

Solurtions:

1) Homeworker to continue to use softphone when in the office - this isnt as bad as it sounds, a homeworker will usualy be working form a laptop anyway so no config changes should be needed.

2) Divert the Soft phone or hard phone to the other before logging off, this can cause problems with VM Hunt groups etc.

3) use Twinning & twin the Softphone the the Hard Phone.
V3.0 & earlier will need the dect integration licence to achive this (it will work even without a dect system) V3.1 has twinning built in.

 

[JeSTeROCK]

I have tried mucking around with this a little bit and gave up on the idea of having the same user on a physical phone.

Found the best way was to have a separate user for the softphone and forward on no answer/busy to the softphone.

Also muck around a little bit with the users voicemail leave points.

To do it with one user you will need to create a base extension that don't exist for the softphone and use login/out but you still have the when its off problem.

 

[IPOUK]

Thanks for the replies - I've tried the twinnging side of things - it's almot a good solution, but the client says when he's on the softphone, the speed dials don't update on people's phone managers etc

Avaya REALLY should document what is supported, as a lot of sales guys assume IP Phone in the office = able to take a softphone and login from home - that's their sales pitches that they can take their extn around with them - fair enough, if it's a digital deployment, then they can't, but if you have an IP extn in the office, then you should be able to take it home with you. Avaya need to sort this out - or a good workaround as at the moment, it's too wooly.

I'm going to keep testing the twinning as I think that's almost a good solution!

 

[JeSTeROCK]

twinning with 3.1 is definately the go.

avaya mention twinning with softphone in the 3.1 launch