FreePBX BLF Time Conditions

My previous post was about increasing the number of Call Routing toggles in FreePBX because I thought that was what I would need to do in order to get BLF (Busy Lamp Field) working with the presence feature on our Polycom SoundPoint phones. The reason I wanted to do that was that so users could have an indication if their phone was in "night mode" or not. As it turns out there is a MUCH better way to handle this.

Step 1
In FreePBX, go to Settings -> Advanced Settings and change "Enable Custom Device States" to True

Step 2
In Applications -> Time Conditions, create your Time Condition. You'll notice that by enabling the previous option, you now have a "Generate BLF Hint" checkbox. Be sure to set that to ON, make sure you also set the "Enable Override Code" box to ON. Once you save the Time Condition, make a note of the override code assigned to it (likely something like *270)

Step 3
On your phone, enable the presence feature. For my SoundPoint IP 601, this meant setting         feature.1.enabled="{$feature_1_enabled|1}" in my server.cfg
I had tried to set feature.1.enabled="1" in sip.cfg which I had seen referenced multiple times, however it never seemed to enable the presence feature.

Step 4
Add the extension *270 to the list of watched extensions on your phone. You can provision it via config file, or set up the extension in the local directory on the phone, and while doing so, scroll down to the "Buddy Watch" option and toggle it to "Enabled"