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Provisioning disabled telephones

Posted by justdave on Tue, 12/09/2008

Every so often as employees change and whatnot, we end up disabling a phone at someone's desk. Since eventually the desk will get used by a new employee, it's usually easier to just leave the phone there than to try to collect it and hand it out again. However, if we just delete the extension in PBX Manager, the phone stays provisioned with the old extension info, and just gets a "failed to connect" status icon on the phone display, and users will get strange errors trying to dial from it. One thing that I've started doing with these phones is to set up a provisioning file for them that has no line buttons, and points at a logo graphic that actually has text in it that says to contact IT to get the phone activated. It would make my life a lot easier if I had a way to get PBX Manager to automatically deploy that provisioning file to a phone when I delete the last-remaining extension mapped to that phone.

I'm not sure how to best implement it... A separate model entry in models.txt for "Model (disabled)" or something like that, I'm sure would be the best way to store the files. Maybe a matching name with a set string on the end of it as a model name would trigger that? Perhaps just "-disabled" on the end of the name, and don't list the ones named that way when mapping a phone to a model, but provision those files to matching phones when removing them? That might be the easiest way to implement, but not exactly discoverable that way either.

Maybe there's better ways to do it, just brainstorming. :)