Phones

Your organization is opening a new contact center and hiring 100 new agents. How do you give each new agent a phone?

What kind of phone can you provide?

Genesys Enterprise Edition supports the main SIP device categories, including hard phones, soft phones, gateways, and soft switches.

Broadly, these devices are either phones or non-phones. Non-phone devices such as gateways and third-party soft switches sit between the Genesys SIP environment and individual phones, and need special handling. The SIP Server 8.1 Integration Reference provides details. Other non-phone devices, such as trunks and ACD queues, are devices only in the most abstract sense, because the system recognizes them as DNs (Directory Numbers).

Genesys maintains a list of supported SIP phones and gateways.

Who gets which phone?

You identify and assign individual phones by:

• adding them as DNs of the type extension in Genesys Administrator Extension (GAX), OR
• registering them with a soft switch such as Siemens OpenScape Voice or other third-party device

How do you set up and maintain phones?

Phone setup depends on the phone type and the level of support that Genesys offers your specific model. SIP Select devices offer enhanced feature functionality, frequent proactive integration testing, and joint collaboration between Genesys and these partners.

Phone type	Support level	Setup instructions
Hard phone	SIP Select	Use the SIP Device Management documentation, the relevant application note linked from the supported SIP phones and gateways document, and the vendor-supplied configuration instructions.
Hard phone	Basic support	Use the SIP Server documentation and the vendor-supplied configuration instructions.
Soft phone	SIP Select	Use the relevant application note linked from the supported SIP phones and gateways document and the vendor-supplied configuration instructions.
Soft phone	Basic support	Use the configuration software delivered with your soft phone.