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Frequently Asked Questions

How to use IM (chat) and Presence with Zoiper 5

Smart Chat and Presence with Zoiper 5 PRO

To use IM (chat) and presence, your SIP server / VoIP provider must support the functionality as well.

Zoiper uses SIP “MESSAGE” messages for the chat session handling under SIP SIMPLE.

IM and Presence are supported for SIP only.

IM and Presence are available in Zoiper 5 PRO only.

IM and Presence are available by default only when adding a contact with ipPhone type.

 

Custom option per SIP account in Zoiper 5 PRO.

Open Settings > Accounts and select your SIP account.

Click Advanced, scroll down and enable Subscribe presence and Publish presence.

 

 

 

Make sure to save the changes made to the account so that these are taken into effect.

These two options allow your SIP account to have Presence enabled. But in order to see your contacts and their respective Presence statuses, there are a few other things which should be done.

Thankfully with the newly added Smart IM & Presence feature, most of the manual work could be taken care of automatically by Zoiper 5 PRO itself.

 

New contact from Recent call or a message

Let’s say there’s a contact that’s calling you, but you don’t have this contact saved in your Contact list.

You receive a missed call, click on Recent > select the missed call entry from said SIP account.

You can clearly see the notification up top which clearly states that this account doesn’t have a set chat capable phone:

 

 

You have 2 options – either to click on “Set one here” or click the + button at the top right corner.

In both cases, you will be presented with the “Add a contact” window:

 

 

 

To be able to see the Presence status of your new contact you would have to change the Presence account entry – from “Do not use” to your SIP account which has Presence enabled, in this case – Test Account 1.

You might have noticed that if you try to add a new contact after a missed call from said contact, the Contact will be created with the Phone field automatically selected along with a default Dial account selected, but no Presence account selected.

 

 

However, if the said (still not added) contact sends you a message, the Smart Chat & Presence feature in Zoiper 5 PRO will automatically select the necessary Phone type along with Presence account:

 

 

For a more global settings regarding which account you would use by default for dialing and which one for presence, you can set these at Settings > Contacts > Zoiper 5 Contact Service:

 

 

To summarize – you no longer need to manually edit your existing contacts, or when adding a completely new contact to your Contac list, Zoiper 5 PRO will take care automatically of contact types.

  • If you get a call – when adding as a new contact, Zoiper 5 PRO will mark the contact with the Phone type;
  • If you get an IM – when adding as a new contact, Zoiper 5 PRO will mark the contact with the IPPhone type, including your Account that has Presence enabled.

 

New contact from Add contact + button

When adding a new contact through Zoiper 5’s main screen, make sure to change the type of contact to IPPhone so that IM and Presence will be automatically set.

Click on the Add an additional field option on the right hand-side and choose IPPhone as your field type for this contact. Zoiper will automatically set Presence account field to Contact Service. If you select Phone as a field type, the Presence account field will be auto-set to “Do not use”.

 

External Contact Service and Chat & Presence in Zoiper 5 PRO

If you use an external contact source for your contacts, Zoiper 5 PRO allows chat & presence for these contacts as well.

LDAP

When setting up an LDAP Contact Service, make sure that the ipPhone attributes are set accordingly.

In the following example, you can see how LDAP server contacts’ telephoneNumber corresponds to our Work Phone attribute in Zoiper 5 PRO. Here you can just enter the same for “Work IP Phone”:

 

First, we add a new Contact service – LDAP / ActiveDirectory. For testing purposes we are using a test LDAP server.

 

 

Don’t forget to select an account for presence – “Use this account for presence” – from the drop-down menu.

 

Then, you can see how the attributes correspond to default LDAP contact entries, and how we have changed the “Work Phone” attribute for Zoiper 5 PRO to correspond to the actual number of a contact. This is important so that Presence is enabled and usable.

 

 

 

 

Then for testing purposes we have registered both SIP accounts – one in Zoiper 5 PRO and one on Zoiper for Android to a local test server, therefore we could enter as a username whatever we need (the actual phone number located in the Contact entry for Abigail Asher) into Zoiper.

 

 

 

Chat & Presence work and are enabled for Test Account 1 on Zoiper 5 PRO, if we enter another number of a contact from the LDAP contact list, we would get the same result:

 

 

XML

For IM and Presence to work with your XML contacts, you have to go to Settings > Contacts > Zoiper 5 Contact Service and choose your account from the “Use this account for presence” drop-down menu.

Then, there’s a difference. In the contacts xml file, the phone type attribute needs to be set to ipPhone so that IM and Presence is enabled and recognized by Zoiper 5 for the specified contact in the XML.

Example of such XML file in Zoiper 5 PRO: