I've been trying to sort out how to best support phonebooks on roaming EX-series systems, and find the documentation on Phonebook services at large to be poorly organized. Most of what I've figured out has been more from observation.
In general it seems there are two ways to expose TMS phonebooks to endpoints:
- The "classic" way whereby an hardware endpoint is added to TMS and granted access to the phonebooks... endpoints in turn need to have the URL of the web page configured and accessible to them. If an endpoint happens to be external, the TMS Phonebook URL needs to be exposed to them somehow, a VCS-E doesn't proxy this type of transaction for an endpoint.
- The "TMS Agent" way whereby an endpoint (like Movi) receives a Phonebook URI, which it can send SIP messages towards to receive phonebook data responses. Containers in the provisioning directory are granted access to specific phonebooks. This works via VCS-C or VCS-E (where VCS-E directs/proxies these requests to the C), so works equally well internally or externally with no need to expose TMS URLs to the Internet. I've also seen this referred to as the Provisioning Phonebook.
Hopefully I've got the above right.
As near as I can figure out, EX systems seem to fall somewhere in the middle. "TMS Agent" provisioning is now available for these endpoints, which allows us to authenticate them against the Provisioning Directory (like Movi) and push all manner of settings down, but they do not support URI services as Movi does. So to support phonebooks for these endpoints, do you still need to add them as "systems" in the classic sense in TMS (meaning as a System in Navigator, not a Provisioning Directory User) and grant them access to Phonebooks? If this is true, it's a bit confused to require them to be configured in two different locations.
