Howto:How to use Presence on the telephone

Introduction

Applies To

This information applies to

• all innovaphone IP telephones, with innovaphone PBX

Build 09-80350 and later.

Idea

The idea of presence is to publish own current activity and/or freehand note to coworkers. E.g. if in lunch break, we would configure our presence - ativity on the phone to "lunch" and this information is presented to each caller during lunch-time. Further, a colleague may setup a partner function key with our number as destination, and will see our current activity on his phone display permanently. Preset activities to choose from may just not be right in some special cases, so notes may be used for more complex messages,e.g. "back at 16:00".

Background

The innovaphone Presence implementation is based on RFC 4480 - RPID: Rich Presence Extensions to the Presence Information Data Format (PIDF) [1]. Activity and Notes elements have been implemented for both SIP and H.323 endpoints. All other elements (e.g. Mood) have not been implemented.

Setting Activities

Setting own Activity through Main Manu

On the phone, one may set his/her own current activity by navigating through Main-Menu, User-Setup, Presence, and toggling through the list. When done, save the changes by pressing the (green) menu key twice.

Setting own Activity through Presence Function Key

Configure a function key "Presence" either through telephone's web interface or on the telephone display. By subsequent pressing of this function key, one toggles own presence activity until desired activity reached. It is a shortcut for a method described in the previous point.

Setting own Activity automatically

Each time the telephone user goes offhook, or is in a call, the presence is automatically set to "on-the-phone".

Important Note: The automatic presence activity "on-the-phone" was removed in Version 9. Dialog-Info is now supported for monitoring user's telephony activity. Dialog-Info offers much more detail information about user's telephony activity.

Setting a Note through Main Menu

On the phone, one may set his/her own current activity by navigating through Main-Menu, User-Setup, Presence, and enter Your personal note. When done, save the changes by pressing the (green) menu key twice. The caller will now be prsented "back at 16:45" instead of "lunch" as activity.

Displaying activities

Display Activity or Note of called party

The bottom line of telephone display presents the Activity or Note of the called party.

Display Activity of a colleague

Configure a function key "Partner" either through telephone's web interface or on the telephone display. By pressing the key, the partner is called. In idle mode, partner's activity is displayed beside the function key. (See picture: 101 is away).

Presence Mask

Subset of all defined activities

The list of all available activities defined by RFC 4480 is rather long. So only a subset of these are displayed in presence list and presnce toggle function key.

These are:

• away
• busy
• lunch
• meeting
• vacation

As noted before, "on-the-phone" is set automatically but cannot be configured explicitly.

As noted before, "on-the-phone" is not set automatically in Version 9.

All activities defined bt RFC 4480

      none
 1.   appointment
 2.   away
 3.   breakfast
 4.   busy
 5.   dinner
 6.   holiday
 7.   in-transit
 8.   looking-for-work
 9.   lunch
10.   meal
11.   meeting
12.   on-the-phone
13.   other
14.   performance
15.   permanent-absence
16.   playing
17.   presentation
18.   shopping
19.   sleeping
20.   spectator
21.   steering
22.   travel
23.   tv
24.   unknown
25.   vacation
26.   working
27.   worship
28.   do-not-disturb

Defining own subset of activities

Assuming You would like to define a self-made subset of activities, You have to calculate a special presence - bitmask. The presence mask reduces the list of all available activities to a smaller and handier one. Let's suppose, we want to enable "appointment" and "working" only. Appointment is a binary 1 shifted once (1 in the list) and working is a binary 1 shifted 26 times (in the list). We always include the "none" activity, that is a binary 1 not shifted (0). So the bitmask would be 1+(1<<1)+(1<<26).

Compute in e.g. bash shell:

 [$>] echo $((1+(1<<1)+(1<<26)))
 67108867

Alternative:

 Calc: 1+(2^1)+(2^26)

Write to config by invoking:

 config add PHONE USER /presence-mask 67108867
 config write
 config activate

Enable all activities

config add PHONE USER /presence-mask 4294967295
config write
config activate

Removing own subset of activities

To return default presence mask, write to config by invoking:

 config rem PHONE USER /presence-mask 
 config write
 config activate