Sorry for the lame question, but i haven’t ever succeeded to get a whole picture of all this. I can google, and i do, and i read various articles about asterisk, pbx, etc. Maybe this is not clear for me, because i dont have any experience with “phones” stuff.
So. We have:
PBX station (not Asterisk, but hardware one), which i know should support VoIP if needed.
Openfire
Spark
simple phones connected to that PBX (so we can do internal calls, and external ones through a ISDN i suppose)
What we can achieve with that? Can we have “On Phone” presences in Spark or Dial and Accept calls in Spark? We can install Asterisk PBX in some spare PC with linux. We can install Asterisk-IM plugin, if it’s needed to do that.
I dont need instructions how to configure everything. Yet Just want to clarify that thing to myself (and to my boss ).
I am by no means an expert but the one thing that stands out is the non asterisk box you mentioned. If your unit can communicate over the management channel like asterisk then it might work but the plugin is asterisk specific as far as I can tell. The * manager.conf sets the authentication and then however it goes from there.
So what do I do with it? I get presence info from the PBX on the configured extensions. People find that very useful. Perhaps it can do more than that but that is what it does for me. I’d love to be able to get presence from devices such as the FXO and FXS devices but since they aren’t asterisk by themselves I can only see what they do if they are talking to an extension that I’ve configured in the plugin.
It allows you to see when people are on the one, by adding all possible extension associations with a userid. Ex: If I’m on my softphone or physical phone, my status is updated to show ‘On Phone.’ Additionally, I get popup callerid tray alerts when someone calls either of my associated extensions.
Lastly, I can initiate a call (via dialpan or c&p) in spark and have it ring back my primary extension and complete the call for me when I pickup.
If asterisk is not your ‘primary’ pbx (i.e. phones aren’t directly connecting to it), then there’s really no reason to run the plugin.