Customize Look & Feel

Creating a new Skin for sipXecs is easy - It is fully skinnable

sipXecs and in particular sipXconfig have been designed with skinning in mind. In many ways this goes along with localization where look & feel, logos, colors, and all the text are abstracted out of the application.  The look & feel of the sipXconfig user interface can be customized as you would customize other Web pages. The most basic skin consists of a new stylesheet, where sipXconfig abstracts all styles into stylesheets. It is also possible to create a separately installabel component, such as an RPM or DEB, that includes a different skin.  A good but more technical description of how this is done is on the Wiki .  More involved customization could aim at modifying the framework behind, which uses the Tapestry library. This allows changing the entire layout and move different elements around on the page. Some examples on how this can be done are here. We are looking for help to create different skins.

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Managed Phones & Gateways

Plug & Play supported IP Phones

Making or receiving a call combining a SIP phone with an IP PBX usually works out of the box. Providing reliable support for all the calling features, softkeys, presence capabilities, firmware management, profile generation, and auto-discovery capabilities is hard. It is especially hard if you aspire to do regression testing against new firmware revisions in phones and gateways as vendors make changes, add features, resolve bugs and introduce new ones. Based on our experience gained over the last many years we learned that a close relationship with the respective vendor is required to make this work in a reliable way.

In order to facilitate cooperation with the vendor community we created and operate the industry's leading SIP interoperability test portal at http://interop.pingtel.com . Open to everyone, the portal is used to run automated tests for most critical features, which gives you an immediate view on how good a phone really is. Once you pass all the tests, creating a plug & play management plugin is easy and will yield very satisfying results. 

The following table provides some insight into what phones are of high quality and supported well by sipXecs. To a large extent this is a matter of testing and since the core developer team of sipXecs can only test that many phones on a regular basis, many other phones are community maintained. 

We currently reccommend to stay with Polycom, Snom, or LG-Nortel and Audiocodes if you are looking for an easy deployment.

Softphones:

• sipXecs is tested with the Counterpath softphones including Eyebeam,Bria and the new Outlook plugin. The old but free xLite is known to have problems.
• SIP Communicator is a new Java based client that is currently in Alpha release but looks very promising. 

Video phones and other codec related questions:

With sipXecs media does not go through the sipXecs server but is routed direct on your LAN either between phones for internal calls or between a phone and a gateway for external calls. Therefore, sipXecs supports any codec the two participating end-points can negotiate. There is no limit on video calls other than the available bandwidth on your LAN. Polycom HD-Voice is supported as is every other high or low bitrate codec, provided the participating end points support it. 

sipXecs supports plug & play management for Nortel 1535 video phones as well as the Grandstream GXV-3000. In addition, sipXecs supports Counterpath softphones with video. 

How to add support for plug & play management for a new phone or gateway? 

A lot was written already about the ability to manage phones and gateways plug & play. The Wiki includes detailed documentation on what phone and gateway models are already supported and how you can add support for new ones. Again, we are using a plugin framework so that little to no programming is required to add support for a new phone. Essentially what is required is writing an XML specification file that describes all the possible parameters the phone can accommodate. The sipXconfig user interface is then auto-generated from that specification file.

• Phone and Gateway Interoperability Portal
• Adding support for new managed phones
• Adding support for managed gateways
• Adding support for firmware upgrades

Note: Every SIP compliant phone or gateway works with sipXecs. If it is not plug & play managed then it has to be manually configured, which is what you will have to do with most other IP PBX systems anyway.

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Redirector plugins

In the current development release (3.7) Dale added support for redirector plugins. This greatly enhances flexibility of the call routing framework as it is used by the registrar. Redirector plugins are consulted in a configurable order for every cal. ENUM and ISN dialing are implemented as a redirector plugin as are all the other pre-configured dialing rules that exist in the system. New ones can easily be added by writing a new plugin. The advantage of the plugin framework is that you do not have to understand the registrar and all the related complexities. Writing a redirector plugin follows a defined API that is much easier to understand.

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