Making phone calls with Cisco Call Manager

Question

I'm trying to implement a feature in my software where the user can call the customer. I have a Cisco Call Manager with a SIP trunk configured. My question is:

• How can I "send" the phone number to a Cisco CallManager which after receiving the request would call the user's phone (could be Ipphone or cell phone, whatever is configured in my software backend's) and after picking up the phone it would automatically dial the customer's phone number.

I know how to make the IPPhone make the call, but sometimes they do not have an IPPhone assigned, just a cellphone.

I've checked PJsip, would this work for this?

Answer 1

It's doable with skinny endpoints or CISCO phone endpoints in their CISCO sip stacks using CISCO TAPI. Although CISCO's TAPI is not very well documented and would require a bit of infrastructure.

For generic SIP endpoints, you can't do this as the sip trunks endpoints don't show up CISCO TAPI so there is no way to control them through CM.

What you could do is try to do it outside of CM. The main problem is the "auto-answer" of the call before you refer it away. Auto-answer is not part of SIP, for hardware SIP phones (and some softphones), I have seen it implemented in a number of custom device specific ways:

• Telnet into the phone and remote control it that way
• RSH into the phone and remote control it that way
• HTTP command sent to the phone
• Broadsoft SIP extensions

So it's "possible" but I'm guessing not very practical for the amount of work required to get it done.