How to turn your expensive Cisco IP Phone (7965) into a inexpensive Digital Photo Display.

Cisco provides XML services with its IP Phones. It's typically used to view stock prices, local weather, news, or stuff like that. This can be accessed via the services button. It can also be sent to use via a Idle URL, which is basically a phone screensaver.

The newer phones, like the 7965, have a very nice color display; so wouldn't it be nice to view your family photos on your phone, instead of going out and purchasing one of those Digital Photo Displays?

Here is a nice little script that runs on a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack.

Download Here

If you don't want to go through the trouble, you can try our demo URL:

http://blog.pbmit.com/xml/picture.php

Alternately, you can access our main IP Phone Service URL. This should be added to your services URL and not your Idle URL.

http://blog.pbmit.com/cgi-bin/phone.cgi

Unfortunately, general IP phone users cannot easily set their own URLs. You are going to need your Voice guy to help with that part.

Intended Use
This can be an effective marketing tool to get company graphics or info out to the employees.

I also find it helpful for that one employee who needs a little morale boost.

Formating
For the image display we are using the XML element. Cisco Phones are particular about the type and size of the images. For this element, the image has to be a .png. I recommend 293 x 153 for the 7965. It really depends on your specific model of phone. Cisco provides resolutions for each of their phones; however, you can't run the full screen resolution for this XML, so you will have to play around with the resolution until you get something you like.

For image formats in Photoshop, I used PNG-24. You can also use the default .png format in Windows Paint.

Other Unconventional Uses

We have come up with a few other uses for this feature:

Read more here