Presence with Asterisk

[Aaron Rosenthal]

Presence is one of my favorite features and is entirely possible with Asterisk+Bluetooth. Presence is the ability for the IP PBX to recognize when someone's in or out of the office. When you're in the office, the IP PBX will route calls to your desk phone, and when you're out of the office calls are automatically routed to your cell.

Bluetooth is the primary technology that makes this all possible since most cell phones these days all have bluetooth, plus it's a perfect proximity based technology; ideal for presence. Here's an article by Little Nerds which discusses how to get presence up and running specifically with Asterisk.

To make this work in a much larger office, and to have it work for an entire user population, I think it would be a great idea for handset manufacturers to start incorporating bluetooth into their phones for this very purpose. This way my desk phone is what recognizes my presence and the IP PBX could route calls accordingly even if I were in the office but not at my desk. I wonder if you could combine presence with extension mobility... that might be excessive!

Has anyone gotten presence to work with Asterisk using something other than Bluetooth?