XMPP and Presence - How does this work?
You need two different things in order to provide presence information via XMPP in order to allow it to automatically interact with your phone.
1. A softphone of hardphone that supports dialogue events.
2. XMPP client
Here's a quick "what works" guide:
Phone |
XMPP CLient |
Status |
|---|---|---|
X-Lite (free) |
Only able to view others status. Can manually set your status. |
|
Bria Pro 2.5 or Bria 3.0 (paid) |
BUILT IN XMPP Client (paid) |
Works to both view others and auto sets your phone status |
Polycom (any current version) |
Works to both view others and auto sets your phone status |
So you see you have limited functionality with X-Lite, it's really all manual, but you can see the status of others. You also see with Bria (Counterpath) softphones, the dialogue event link is directly tied to using their XMPP client. If you use Spark or Pdigin and Bria it won't work to automatically publish your presence. What you will find is that it will "login", and the first time you use the phone it will change your stats to "On the phone" for others to see. What will not happen is the dialogue will not revert back to "available" after you hang up. Your presence gets into a stuck state and is not at all helpful, so don't do it that way.
Using a Polycom phone and a separate XMPP client also gets you the same "experience" level as an Integrated Bria phone. It does properly update your status as you get on and off the phone.
The current Counterpath Plugin for sipXecs is tied to the Counterpath Bria 2.5 client. Counterpath no longer sells the 2.5 client, instead selling the 3.0 version. In Bria 3.0, the parameters have changed which require "manual" tweaking of the configuration files in sipXecs. If you are using the Bria 3.0 phone and the Counterpath provisioning function in sipXecs, please refer to this page for additional functions that you need to add manually at this time.
Be Careful
Remember, setting your XMPP status to "Do Not Disturb" kicks your calls into voicemail without any indication a call came in on your phone if you have the settings enabled under the user IM settings. So you won't even see the missed calls in your phone call log.
Phone presence in IM status (Default: checked) If checked advertise the user's busy status in the XMPP status message. Call info in IM status (Default: unchecked) If checked include the caller info in the busy status of the XMPP status message. Status message (Default: On the phone) The content of the message used as XMPP status when user is busy. Voicemail on DnD (Default: unchecked) If checked, all calls received when Do Not Disturb status is set through XMPP client are forwarded directly to Voicemail.
Helpful Information
Pidgin is a multi-protocol client. This means you can enable ,multiple user accounts (different networks) on it at the same time. Spark and the built-in BRIA XMPP client are for a single account.