Users can login from the web page by providing their userid and password. Userid is a unique identifier for a user and is of the form user@domain.
User accounts and various information are maintained in SQL database.
The system administrator must install the system before the users can use it. See the installation manual available with distribution.
Make sure that your browser is configured to enable Java and JavaScript. For example, for Netscape, go to Edit->Preferences->Advanced, and click the check boxes for "Enable Java" and "Enable JavaScript". Also it important to enable "Accept all cookies". Your browser should support frames. Both Netscape and Internet Explorer support frames.
Placing your mouse on the appropriate icon will display the purpose of that icon. various icons correspond to "Edit user profile", "Edit aliases", "Edit contacts", "Log out", and so on. Administrators also have additional menu items for "List users", "Add user", "Gateway class", and "Configure".
Note that the registration authentication is a system wide global configuration option and can not be changed on per-user basis, unlike call authentication.
Most User set the algorithm to MD5 for authentication.
If the user has been configured to have voice mail then he can set the RTSP URL for the outgoing message prompt which gets played when the user's phone is busy or there is no response. Alternatively you may upload your own recorded message as the prompt. This prompt is played when your phone is busy or there is no response.
When a new voice mail is received an email notification is sent to the user. The format of the email can be altered on a per-user basis. For example, a user using web based email system would prefer to have HTTP URLs in the email.
Users can also set the timeout after which the call is forwarded to the voicemail system. And the maximum size of each message allowed for this user. The total size of all the messages is a system level global configuration option.
This page also allows you to sign-out from the service. Another confirmation dialog is presented before actually deleting user account.
The contact must be a valid URL. Usually the SIP server does not forward the call to a non-sip URL.
Preference for a particular contact has value between 0.0 to 1.0. Higher value is more preferred. So 1.0 is the most preferred contact. The SIP server in proxy mode tries to contact the locations based on the preference values, higher preference first. All contacts with same preference value are contacted at the same time, i.e., all those phones will ring simultaneously.
Users can specify the expiry time. If nothing is specified then the contact location never expires.
Users can choose whether the contact locations should be contacted in proxy or redirect mode. Proxy mode is transparent to the calling party and hence may be preferred at times. Please note that all the contact locations must have the same mode. You can not have one contact as proxy and another as redirect.
After clicking on the voice mail icon
you can view your voice messages. The interface is similar to other
web based email systems like hotmail. An example inbox is shown below.
The red pointer indicates that the message is a new message.
The date is column lists the time/date when the message was received.
The senders address is in "From" column. Subject is the SIP subject of the
original call. If the SIP call has priority then it is printed before the
subject. If there is no subject then the message number is
displayed instead. The size of the message is given in both seconds and
kilobytes.
User can delete the messages by selecting them; clicking on the check box in the left most column and then clicking on the "Delete Selected" link. Mails can be moved to other folders by selecting the mails and selecting the appropriate folder. The selected mails can be forwarded to a specified email address as email attachments.
Voice messages are stored as .au files or G.711 Mu Law 8kHz 8bit audio file. To play the voice message you can just click on the subject field of the appropriate message. Make sure that your browser is configured to play the MIME-type of audio/basic (or .au extension) properly. For example on Solaris with netscape, you can edit the preferences as Edit->Preferences->Navigator->Applications->New.
Description: AU MIMEType: audio/basic Suffixes:.au Application: audioplay -i -V -v 100 -p speaker %s.
Click on the conferencing icon
to display the conferencing page. An example conferencing page is shown
below.
The conference is identified using a conference URL. For example,
if the conference URL is "test" then the users can join the conference
by dialing "sip:test@domain" where domain is the domain your system is in.
Restricted conferences can restrict the participation of the users
in terms of who can listen or speak.
Administrators can view the list of users by clicking on the list icon
. The list gives a comprehensive listing of the
registered users.
The gateway class menu allows an
administrator to update the gateway class needed for making a call to a
telephone number through a SIP-PSTN gateway. Different gateway classes
can have different dialing privileges, e.g, student may be disallowed
from dialing a long distance number where as faculty and staff may be
allowed to do so. Every user is given a gateway class, similar to the
unix group id. When a user wants to make a call to a telephone number
the gateway class of the user is compared against the allowed gateway
classes for that type of number. Please see the example
sipd/gateways.sample and tools/canonicalize/dialplan.sample files and
associated documentation.
Accounting, rating and billing are three stages that are based on the SQL request log for the SIP server. This feature is designed to support simple re-billing, not serve as a multi-user billing interface. For example, the mechanism does not support fixed charges, multiple currencies, sending invoices or collecting credit card information. It should be sufficient for many departmental rebilling applications.
The request log function lists all
requests, if invoked by the administrator, or the requests of the user
logged in. The request list can be sorted according to time, request
type, source and destination by clicking on the column heading. At the
bottom of the page, a menu allows to limit the list to a particular time
range. This feature will only work if the server has been configured to log requests to the SQL database.
Tariffs can be created and edited . A tariff
specifies what a call costs per time unit. A tariff applies to a
certain date range and during certain times of the day. Also, it can be
restricted to a user class. The current
implementation does not support tariffs that apply only on certain days,
e.g., weekends and holidays, as most telecom tariffs are now
time-insensitive. The prefix indicates the user name this tariff
applies to, generally a phone number. This is a glob pattern,
with ? representing any single character and * any
number of characters. Thus, +1212* represents phone numbers in
Manhattan. Note: in almost all cases, a trailing * is
required. Tariff durations are automatically rounded, i.e., an end time
of 23:59 is rounded to 23:59:59. There is no need to delete tariffs; if
a particular tariff is no longer valid, mark its end date accordingly.
For each billing period, calls can be rated , i.e., assigned a cost. Each call is only rated once, since
the billing period and cost is recorded in the call detail record. It
is possible that some calls do not match any tariff and thus cannot be
rated. Calls that could not be rated are listed in orange.
Finally, users can see their bills for each
billing period. All calls are tallied by time, duration and
destination, with a total duration and expense given.
The administrator user can edit the configuration options from the
web by clicking on the configuration icon . The configuration page allows you to edit various
application specific configuration files, e.g., "sipd.conf"; as well as
the global system configuration file "cinema.conf". Please refer to
sipd documentation for editing "sipd.conf" file. Please refer to
installation manual for editing "cinema.conf" file.
Users are advised to log out
after they are done. If the users do not log out then the userid and
password are stored in the system and next time the user visits the web
page he does not have to enter the password again.