Theoretical Managed IP-PBX Question

[gregarican]

Our company is switching over from a traditional on premises PBX to an offsite managed IP PBX. The desk phones will be Polycom SoundPoint IP phones and basically we're just passing through a PoE Ethernet switch to a router out to the provider's cloud.

My question is I would like to link caller ID with some of our third party apps and I read that Polycom has an open source SDK. Would this be doable then? The IP phones themselves will be on a VLAN through the Ethernet PoE switch. If I bridge over to it through my PC workstations then would I be able to readily pull the incoming caller ID and use it? Or would I have to somehow link to the offsite managed IP PBX that's out there in the provider's cloud?

Ever since 1996 I've worked with TSAPI and still use it even with our existing Merlin PBX'es. But the CTI implementation of this new setup that will be installed has me doing some digging

 

[phoneguy55]

Good luck with that. Hopefully this isn't your decision. If so, I suggest you freshen up your resume.

 

[whykap]

All is controlled by your provider (that;s why it is called managed so they will have to configure that for you to allow for TAPI integration. Even though the TAPI controls the phone it will have to be allowed and configured on the remote softswitch.
You better make sure they are capable of that and also if they will allow you to do so before you put it in.

 

[Sympology]

At a stretch you could intercept the SIP stream with a SIP proxy and do some funky stuff there, but not sure how easy this is (and if the 3rd party apps + SIP TAPI) could do it.

Robert Wilensky:
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

 

[gregarican]

This CTI isn't a 100% requirement, but would be a nice feature to have. That's why if it's not doable it won't wreck anything. I suppose I'll find out soon. Reading up on the Polycom SDK this allows web-based routines to run within the XML microbrowser on the desk phones. But that doesn't touch any of the call or phone based data flowing through the system.

 

[gregarican]

Heard back from the provider and they do not currently offer this type on service in their hosted IP PBX solution. So now my focus is back on the Polycom SoundPoint IP phones. To date I have created an XHTML app that can populate customer records based on the phone number. This can display on the phones through the scaled down web browser they have. But my test app currently requires the user to manually type in the phone number.

Is there any way to derive this from the phone itself? Otherwise perhaps I could write an small desktop app that would listen to the network stream and pull the caller ID from there, since it has to pass through to the phone through the LAN. Although even that might be tough since it will be through a VLAN with a switched (i.e. - not broadcast) PPoE port.

Oh well, this would be a bonus feature but not a deal breaker. If it proves to be too difficult I will move on...sigh...