Busylight for Cisco and Lync

You have probably seen devices like that.

When the person is on the phone, they light up red, green when available.

We acquired a few of these BusyLights from kuando. Writing this in 2020 I figured they still exist.

Big company, diverse requirements and environments: Some of our internal customers had Microsoft Lync (now called Skype-for-Business), some others used Cisco desk phones. As an engineer working on both systems, I was being called by colleagues/customers on either of these solutions.

The device was designed for Lync and it lit up red fine when someone called me there. It did however not when someone called me on my Cisco phone and people believed I was available because the indicator was still on green.

Solution

I have built a Windows application which connected to both, Cisco and Lync and unified the status. It displayed red when I was busy on either of the phones, and green if free on all of them. Other colours could be defined for statuses like ringing, voicemail etc.

The software written in .NET (actually, Mono-Project) connected to Cisco CallManager by JTAPI and to Lync by the respective Assembly to watch the status. An icon in the system tray was provided where the light also could be manually forced to any color and set back to automatic.

The source code is available on request.