Love you Obama. Call me.
If you have multiple Aastra phones in the house. You can easily keep all of their directories up to date. Here’s how:
create a text file named directory.csv
In the text file enter names in the following format:
Joe Smith, 8885551234 ,1 ,Home ,private
Maggie Smitth, 8885551111 ,1 ,Cell ,private
You can change the categories, Home or Cell or Office or Work etc.
Maggie Smitth, 8885551111 ,1 ,Home ,private
Maggie Smitth, 8885551111 ,1 ,Work ,private
Maggie Smitth, 8885551111 ,1 ,Cell ,private
Maggie Smitth, 8885551111 ,1 ,Office ,private
When sifting through names on the phone, you will not have to scroll through 4 Maggie Smiths. Using the above format you will see only one entry for Maggie Smith and then you can choose to scroll through her sub categories. You can also change which number is shown on the display first. So if you find yourself calling her cellular phone the most, you change it so when scrolling through names, her cellular number is shown by default.
The other variable to take note of is the privateand public. The cordless handset that you can optionally purchase with the Aastra 57i can only hold up to 50 contacts in it. All the numbers whether public or private will be shown in the Aastra 57i Corded phone. But only public numbers will be shown in the Cordless Handset. I used the public variable for any numbers I would find myself calling while gardening or watching a movie and I’m not near the lobby phone.
Okay so you’ve added all your contacts into the directory.csv file. Save the file and upload it to your asterisk servers TFTPboot directory. Or more specifically the directory you Aastra phones look to for provisioning.
In the TFTPboot directory you should see a file namedaastra.cfg.
Open aastra.cfg with a text editor and at the very bottom of the file enter in the text
directory 1: directory.csv
Save and close the file.
Reboot your Aastra phones and their directories should now reflect your file.
The above method is a very ‘manual’ way of updating the directories. I may write a script so that when the directory.csv file is updated on the server, the phones reboot auto magically.
Have fun!
*I found a bug. You may have to delete the phones directory list using the phone’s menus. And then reboot the phone for it to pickup on the directory changes.*