I set up a FreePBX server for my school and most of it went smoothly. We have almost 50 Polycom phones and Endpoint Manager made it very easy to assign the phones to the right extensions and put the right BLFs and speed dials on them. The one issue that I ran into is that I put a Color Expansion Module on our receptionist’s phone, added all the extensions for our school in the right order in Endpoint Manager, left spaces between some BLFs to make it easier to find the right extensions quickly, and updated the phone. To my surprise the BLFs were all on the phone and Expansion Module but they weren’t spaced correctly and were mashed together starting with the phone and then spilling over onto the Expansion Module.

I did some research and found out that Polycom has a way to space out the Line Keys, but Endpoint Manager doesn’t have that functionality added. My solution was to make a separate config file with the correct order and spacing per Polycom’s directions and write a Bash script to insert it into the receptionist phone’s features.cfg file. Although it does work, any changes to the order or spacing must be done by hand and Endpoint Manager will overwrite the changes when it rebuilds the config. To overcome that, I made a cron job to run the Bash script every five minutes and since it is only one phone, making edits to the config by hand isn’t too tedious.
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