VoIP Handsets for Avaya Flare

[LinkZ]

We have had an Avaya IPOffice500 VoIP system installed over the easter break, it uses the One-X Portal on the desk phones we have which works fine, however we wanted to use softphones around the rest of the school as the edge switchs we have are quite old and do not support VLAN's. To achieve this we were given the Avaya Flare software and recommended to buy in some Plantronics P240 handsets.

 

The software and handsets are causing us all sorts of problems. First off the Flare software stores its settings in xml files in the user profiles, however we use mandatory profiles which means the data stored in them gets deleted at log off. I have a work around in order to automatically fill in the server IP info, however we cannot automatically set the machines to use the Plantronics P240 handsets, as they are seen as a separate audio device and you cannot specify them in the xml files in the user profile as each machine gives the handsets a different hardware ID.

 

Does anyone have an experience in using Flare over a network with mandatory profiles that would be able to help me out a bit?

 

As an alternative to the P240 handsets can anyone recommend some decent wireless handsets that aren't headsets that you wear? The staff would like to use a normal looking telephone handset rather than an ear piece.

[MatthewL]

I used OneX in my previous job, luckily it was laptops with the same users logging into it, but its was a PITA to configure for each user, never did find a easy way. I may be right in thinking you do something with the DHCP options and point to a central XML file but don't quote me on that, never did get chance to have a look before I left.

[FN-GM]

Have you considered using redirected app data?

[LinkZ]

We're using mandatory profiles so I can have a single config.xml for them easily, so using this i've managed to get the server settings in there automatically for each user, but the problem is with the handsets we are using. In the config.xml on my machine for example it shows the correct USB device we would like to use, and it references it using a hardware ID, but the hardware ID is different for each USB handset on each machine, so I can't configure that all from one config.xml file.

[FN-GM]

You can still redirect with mandatory profiles. So you don't have to have a single XML.

[LinkZ]

I didn't realise you could do that. I'll have a look into that now, thanks.