We’ve recently begun upgrading our phone system at the office to a new VOIP setup. We’ve been setting everyone up with some nice Linksys phones. These things are pretty nice, with lots of neat features for a desk phone. One of these features is the ability to check a phone’s status over the network - you can see if someone is available to take a call, if the line is busy, stuff like that. Good stuff to know if you need to transfer a client to someone - you can check if they’re available or not before trying to transfer them.

Now for the reason I mention Spry, and think it rocks: John setup a mini web service that checks our VOIP server and returns some XML that gives the status of everyone’s phone. I then built a Dashboard Widget that pings this service and displays everyone’s phone status in the Dashboard. I decided to give Spry a go, and it was slick.

I spent more time playing with the design and layout of the widget than I did actually writing the JavaScript that parses the XML to display the phone info. It was a little tricky at first, as I couldn’t find any documentation on what methods were available, but once I found what I needed, the actual code took about 15 minutes.

If you haven’t checked out Spry, I suggest you do:

Spry framework for Ajax