Use real phone as a softphone
November 22, 2018 7:54 AM   Subscribe

The office where I work has been remodeled into an open office plan. They've taken away our physical telephones so we have to use softphones, run through our computers. I have a headset for conference calls. Can I get a real phone and connect it to my computer to use as a softphone for regular calls?

We use Skype for conference calls and Cisco Jabber for regular dial telephone service. I have a USB headset already. I also have a set of Bluetooth headphones I use with my iPhone, but they don't work consistently with the computer. I realize I probably won't be able to dial with the keypad on the phone, but it'd be nice if the ringer worked.

All of the adapters I've seen appear to be out of production. Also, I work for a company, so I'm still using Windows 7 and I can't install software (some USB drivers install OK, some don't).

I realize that this may add some additional noise to the office environment, but I'll bet it picks up less ambient noise than our headsets, and anyway maybe the company should've thought of that before they took our walls away. (It was a cubicle farm before; it's just a shorter-walled, closer-packed cubicle farm now.)
posted by Huffy Puffy to Technology (6 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
https://www.amazon.com/Digitus-DA-70772-USB-Telephone-Handset/dp/B000FIH4FQ

These things just look like a bog-standard USB sound card to the PC, so they should work with any softphone and shouldn't need extra drivers installed.
posted by flabdablet at 8:23 AM on November 22, 2018


You can almost certainly get a USB handset to work. The computer will treat it like any USB audio device. The softphone may have to be set to use that "sound card" rather than whatever it is using now, but that would be the extent of it.

To set up an actual IP phone, you'd need to get it network access and the correct credentials and would likely anger your IT department. (Your cell phone would probably be easier to network and can also do what you need, possibly with added software depending on OS/brand.)
posted by wierdo at 8:24 AM on November 22, 2018


Do you have unlimited minutes on your cellphone? You can set up auto forwarding (time specific if you wish) on most soft phone services. I did this years ago and I love it because I can take calls in other areas of the office and not at my desk, which can be useful in an open office situation.
posted by q*ben at 9:44 AM on November 22, 2018


I'm not quite sure what you're asking to do....can you not just use your headset with Jabber? As I recall, Jabber as a softphone will talk to whatever you have connected on the PC - headsets are universal this way.

There is a mobile client for Jabber as well. In my opinion, it's not a very good piece of software and your IT staff MAY have to pay for a license for you to use it (not sure of that) but if you're wanting a different device than the headset, that would be a way to go.

Alternatively, you could use something like a Plantronics Savi headset, which is a DECT-wireless headset that would let you get up and move away from the computer and still answer calls if you needed to. Most of them will also pair to your mobile simultaneously.

But again...the whole point of having a softphone is so that you don't have a physical one, so connecting one to your PC will likely be an IT-flavored violation of some sort.
posted by Thistledown at 6:15 AM on November 23, 2018


Response by poster: I want to buy a plain old telephone, the kind that uses an RJ11 plug, and tell my computer to use it instead of my headset (some of the time). Because I want to pretend I lived in a civilized time when people who had a phone number had an actual phone that they could pick up and talk to people on.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 6:47 AM on November 23, 2018


I want to buy a plain old telephone, the kind that uses an RJ11 plug, and tell my computer to use it instead of my headset

That will require quite a bit of IT/network/telecom infrastructure to make happen, which your employer has obviously said no to by giving you softphones. The phones that look like the style of telephone you want are (almost) always VOIP hardphones that connect to your LAN. In other words, that isn't going to happen.
posted by ralan at 7:03 AM on November 23, 2018 [3 favorites]


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