We've recently acquired a few Cisco 7937G phones, and they only speak SCCP and not SIP. Asterisk has a chan_sccp that supports this, but there's no support for it in PBX Manager. Any chance of getting it added?
I'm not a reseller, I'm just
I'm not a reseller, I'm just a customer with a mid-size deployment (400ish extensions across 4 locations and growing). I use the single-tenant edition, and just want to use the phones I have. I also have several IP6000 and IP7000 Polycom phones, and I agree, they're nice. :) Until this last week we were a 100% Polycom shop (mostly IP501s). I don't make the purchasing decisions, I'm just told to make it work. We got a number of Cisco 7941 phones (which do SIP), and a few Cisco 7937s (which don't) in the most-recent new-phone purchase.
I just asked the guy who did
I just asked the guy who did our purchasing, and he says the Cisco 7937G was about $425 cheaper than the Polycom IP 7000 (the Polycom equivalent). He also says that Cisco's higher-end stuff (even the newer models) all only does SCCP, which makes him doubt that they're abandoning that protocol. It's only the lower-end stuff that does SIP, and that's probably because people who can afford the high-end stuff can afford Cisco call-routing gear.
He went ahead and got them because Asterisk claims to support SCCP, without thinking to check if the web management stuff we were using actually had support for configuring it.
That said, they can be made to work without support from PBX Manager, it's just a pain because of having to hand-enter them in the user_extensions file and not having them visible in the UI.
Since you arent in need of
Since you arent in need of voicemail or advanced extension handling features like findme/follow me (I mean seriously its a conference room device).. why not manipulate them as feature code extensions and write a custom script to handle them? This should be fairly simple since a Dial and timeout handling is all that is required.
just be advised that chan_skinny is still experimental and complete lockups have been reported as a result. There is a third party module you could pursue called chan_sccp-b. I have heard its sufficiently better at functioning than chan_skinny. As its not part of asterisk-core there is no way it could be included in the Thirdlane distribution (it would be a support impossibility). This puts the burden on the pbx administrator for implementation. Again, the channel file sccp.conf would have to be tended to manually, but the feature code settings could be address by crafting a handler script in PBX Manager. Since its needs are relatively simple this wouldn't require an overly significant amount of scripting.
But you did apparently
But you did apparently convince my boss to send back the Ciscos and get Polycoms. :) Yay! So much easier to configure.
The SCCP module is considered experimental. Thirdlane will not risk liability by including support for such a protocol. Cisco themselves even abandoned SCCP in favor of SIP; albeit not complying to the RFCs and not fully interop.
Lastly, this isnt even Cisco's phone. They paid Polycom to OEM their SoundPoint IP 7000 and Cisco just wrote SCCP software for the hardware. Why pay $1600 for a $1000 phone($800 if your a reseller)?
Do you know why Cisco has consistently re-branded polycom conference phones (4000 and the 7000)? Because their speakerphone technology sucks.
Save your clients $500 and just sell them the IP7000, it works great with PBX Manager.