Caller ID looks up FileMaker Client Record with VOIP Telephone

What you need for this project:

• an IP-based Phone – a SIP phone – think of this like Skype, except non-proprietary. As an open-standard, any companies can make phones for it or sell the bandwidth to communicate between SIP phones. ($100-$250/phone set)
• a Voice Over Internet Phone (VOIP) service with an assigned phone number (varies but usually much less expensive than a standard phone service)
• 360Works RemoteScripter plugin ($195)
• FileMaker Pro – setup with a script that takes a phone number or name value and opens a new window and does a lookup based on the provided parameters.

Yealink IP Phones  are available for about $100 on Amazon. There are many options to select from in SIP phones and VOIP service providers. Neo Code Software already had the Yealink phones in place. These phones are rated as having good sound quality at a reasonable price. Before you purchase a SIP phone system, check that it offers a similar URL call out action feature first.

Neo Code Software uses VOIP.ms, but there are a large number of other VOIP providers. Ask around to see who your friends and colleagues recommend.

FileMaker’s URL Scheme in FileMaker Pro 13 is much improved and allows one to send parameters with a URL script call. Unfortunately, this won’t work for Neo Codes’ purposes, because their Yealink phones were not setup to know that fmp://whatever.. is a URL.

Instead, Neo Code chose 360Works RemoteScripter plugin to capture a more traditional-looking ‘http’ URL coming from the phone.

In the Yealink phone, these are the steps, different SIP phones will take different approaches to this.

• Press the Menu Button
• Press the Status Buttton
• The first item in the list is the phone’s IP address.

Make sure the SIP phone you buy has a web interface for administering the phone.

In a web browser, enter the IP address for the phone (that you got from the previous step). You should see a User Name and Password prompt to gain access to the phone settings. Hopefully your system administrator recorded this information somewhere accessible.

Look for an area that allows you to execute URL actions when an Incoming Call occurs.

In the Yealink telephone web interface, click on the

1) Phone Tab
2) Action URL sidebar
3) Incoming Call field – Enter your URL to send to FileMaker in this field

If the Yealink were modern enough to recognize fmp:// as a URL, then you could use FileMaker’s built-in URL Scheme. That would have looked something like this:

FMP://192.168.1.78/CallerID.fmp12?script
    =Lookup_Client&param=$remote&$display_remote

If your phone system is more modern, perhaps it will be able to send this type of URL to FileMaker Pro. Unfortunately, the web server in the Yealink is a few years old, and doesn’t recognize more modern URL schemes, so the work around was to use an http:// formed URL, and send it the 360Works RemoteScripter plugin instead.

According to the Yealink manual, (page 62) that URL looks something like this:

http://192.168.15.113:4546/?$remote&$display_remote

Breaking down that URL, we see first the IP address of the FileMaker Pro machine, then a port number 4546, which is what the ScripterRemote is listening on and finally, we are sending the remote name and phone number as parameters. When these parameters get to FileMaker Pro and the script runs, it will search on the name and/or phone number to find the client.

There is good information on 360Works web site on setting up their plug-in, including a video explaining many of the features and how to set them up. Once you have the plugin installed, you configure it to listen on a specified port. When a request comes in on at port, it acts in a similar manner to FileMaker Pro 13’s URL scheme, running a script with a set of parameters.

Note: Because this approach is using a plug-in rather than native FileMakerPro, the implication is that it could be made to work with the FileMaker 7 file format (FileMaker Pro versions 7 through 11). FileMaker Pro 13 offers the possibility of a plug-in free approach, if your SIP phone supports the fmp protocol.

That’s it. I hope this provides some inspiration for you on setting up your own phone system with this ability to talk to FileMaker Pro. Some other ideas to add to your script: set the script to log the call to a correspondence table. It is also possible to send outbound requests from FileMaker Pro to the telephone to initiate a customer call.

I will close with a quote from Joshua Paul of Neo Code Software:

“I built it for the challenge — not because I wanted it, but you know what? — it is awesome! Steve is a genius — what a great idea! Having FileMaker Pro show me the client record instantly is amazing. It’s like having a cell phone vs a home phone. You don’t realize how much you needed it because it isn’t like anything you’ve ever had. I can’t live without it now. I can’t imagine not having it.”

If you are just getting started with VOIP systems and/or FileMaker want to talk to a consultant about getting your company setup with such a system, contact Neo Code Software.