EPM-Tips and Tricks

This page has tips for the End Point Manager (Commercial) module.

Associating a phone key to toggle "Follow Me" and also light the key LED to show current Follow Me status

• Tested with EPM ver. 2.11 on FreePBX 2.11 with Aastra 6737i phones

The simplest way to create a Follow Me toggle key is to assign a key to dial *21, the normal Follow Me feature code. Asterisk will announce the new Follow Me status when the key is pressed. However, the key does not visually light to indicate if Follow Me is enabled or disabled. The procedure below will add this.

Enable custom device state feature codes

• FreePBX 2.11

  • Go to Settings > Advanced Settings in the FreePBX web GUI

  • Set the "Enable Custom Device States" setting to True and save the change. This will configure Asterisk to generate custom feature codes for a variety of toggle-able features such as Follow Me, Time Conditions or Call Forwarding

• FreePBX 12

  • The "Enable Custom Device States" is no longer present in the Settings > Advanced Settings page. In a test on a FreePBX 12 installation, custom device state hints were already on, so perhaps this setting is now enabled by default. Do the confirmation step below to ensure this feature is on with your installation.

• Confirm custom hints now exist by issuing the Asterisk command-line command "core show hints". You should see a large number of hint codes, including a series in the form *21nnn@ext-findmefollow where nnn is an extension number.

Assign a BLF (busy lamp field) key to the desired Follow Me hint feature code

• Edit the EPM template for the desired type of phone and edit the softkey assignment section to assign a softkey with the following settings:
  
  

  • Type: BLF

  • Label: Follow Me

  • Value: *21%line1Ext%      (this uses the built-in EPM 2.11 basefile variable %line1Ext%, which is replaced by EPM with the specific extension for each phone, allowing the same template to automatically be customized for each extension – see EPM-Variables exposed in Base File Editor; for EPM 12, the variable name is different)

  • Account: Global

  • Advanced > State: only "Idle" is enabled as this key should only be used when the phone is not in active use

• After saving the template, go to "Extension Mapping" and run the "Rebuild Configs" command for each phone using the modified template to push out the change to phone configuration files

• Reboot phones to force an immediate reconfiguration or let them pick up the new template on a scheduled basis if they are configured to do so

Associating a phone key to toggle "Do Not Disturb" and also light the key LED to show current Do Not Disturb status

• Tested with EPM ver. 12 on FreePBX 12 with Aastra 6731i phones

This procedure will use device state hints to enable a phone softkey to both toggle "Do Not Disturb" on or off but also indicate the current status of the setting with an LED light.

Enable custom device state feature codes

• Proceed as with the "Follow Me" example, above

Assign a BLF (busy lamp field) key to the desired Do Not Disturb hint feature code

• Edit the EPM template for the desired type of phone and edit the softkey assignment section to assign a softkey with the following settings:
  
  

  • Type: BLF

  • Label: Do Not Disturb

  • Value: *76__line1Ext__ (this uses the built-in EPM ver. 12 basefile variable __line1Ext__, which is replaced by EPM with the specific extension for each phone, allowing the same template to automatically be customized for each extension – see EPM-Variables exposed in Base File Editor; for EPM 2.11, the variable name is different)

  • Account: Account1

  • States: only "Idle" is enabled as this key should only be used when the phone is not in active use

• After saving the template, go to "Extension Mapping" and run the "Rebuild Configs" command for each phone using the modified template to push out the change to phone configuration files

• Reboot phones to force an immediate reconfiguration or let them pick up the new template on a scheduled basis if they are configured to do so

Characters in custom entries not provisioning on Grandstream

Some characters need to be encoded, so if adding to basefiles please replace the following:
+    =    %2B
%   =    %25
=    =    %3D
&    =    %26