At the beginning of this month I had the chance to build a simple web application for Cisco IP Phone.

The reason why it became necessary to build the application is that a Cisco IP Phone can store only up to 99 phone numbers in its directory. It is a very small amount of data for a medium or large sized company.

In developing the web system I have used Java, MySQL, JSP, CiscoIPPhone API, and Tomcat.

In this system, data are stored in the Database server. The Cisco IP Phone simply submits an HTTP request to the web server which then connects to the Database server and receives the data in response. Thus, a large amount of data could be stored.

This system was mainly developed for text based Cisco IP Phones thus I have used mainly the following CiscoIPPhone tags.

Dial:#

Later, while supporting in the development of a graphic based application I have learned the following, which might be useful for future developers. I am going to mention here a few of them.

There could be at most 32 MenuItems in a CiscoIPPhoneGraphicFileMenu

Cisco IP Phones allow a maximum of 100 MenuItems. Each MenuItem includes a Name and an Associated URL.

Users might prefer to have their choices presented in a non-ASCII character set such as Kanji or Arabic. When using non-ASCII character sets, the system presents the information as a bitmap graphic. To select a menu, the user enters a number from 1 to 12 using the numeric keypad (* and # are not active).

It is NOT possible to bring together the graphics and text tags on the same screen.

In a Cisco Unified IP Phone 7975G, it is best to set the Display Area to 280 x 160
and the color depth to 24 bit.

Hope the article will help someone someday, if not at present.

Bests,

Islam