Jabber Away status and Location

[mclewley1]

We have Jabber users (11.9) that are creating custom locations to indicate an office/extension they will be using for the day. This changes on a regular basis and these users are not assigned their own, unique extensions so this is a great way for someone to find one of these users as we allow the locations to be shared across everyone. However, the only problem we are running into is when one of these users either locks their PC or their PC goes to sleep. The default Away status in Jabber does not show the location. I know they can use the custom Away messages but that means they have to remember to change it before they lock their PCs. And, most of the time, these users are allowing their PCs to go to sleep, doing other work, so manually changing the Away status doesn't fix the issue. Does anyone know if there is a way for the location to show for the default Away status?

[Jaime Valencia]

No, because that is WAD according to how the product was designed, you would need to reach out to your SE/AM to submit a PER with the business case to ask that to be changed.

Right now, if you go into the automatic away mode, the location will be removed.

[mclewley1]

Thanks for the information Jaime. That was what I was afraid of. We just have a unique scenario and we were hoping that Jabber could help. :)

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

In my opinion, the easiest solution to this is to give each user a permanent extension and teach them how to login to use Extension Mobility. Repurposing the location field for this is a square-peg-round-hole situation, again IMO.

On a related note, CUCM 12.0 added support having the user’s extension for EM login so you can avoid the user objection of alphanumeric typing on a phone keypad. Also, I have seen customers automate the EM login/logout entirely using either a system tray utility running on the PC (Google for them - several 3rd parties sell this if you don’t want to build one); or, some other server-side process that issues API calls to EM on CUCM. The later of which was useful in a VDI environment where a local client couldn’t be used to discover the phone’s CDP advertisement.