Polycom's Buddy Watch function is the only reliable way to do BLF/presence in 3.8, Also, even in 3.10 Buddy Watching will be useful on phones which don't have as many free lines as there are other phones that need to be monitored. For example, I have three registered lines on my 501, which I use for receiving calls. However, say I would like to watch the status of other user's phones. The sipx BLF functionality isn't usable in this case, since there are no free lines available to display the presence state. However, the Polycom Buddy Watch function uses a separate list on the phone display, so it is capable of providing presence information for additional phones.

Given the continued utility of Buddy Watching, we should support it in the sipx GUI. In 3.8 it's not only not supported, it's difficult to even manage it by manually editing the directory.xml files (since sipx always overwrites those files when Sending Profiles).

If we do decide to support the configuration of Buddy Watch we should consider changing our paradigm for defining speed dial info, and do it on a per/phone basis rather than a per/user basis. That would have the let us easily support phone-specific features (and this really is phone-specific functionality; for example, I know that Polycom and snom both have useful, but different, twists on speed dial and directories, and that's likely true of other phones we do or will support).

However, if we decide not to directly support the configuration of Buddy Watching then we should at least allow the administrator to disable phonebook support in sipx (ideally on a per/user basis). Then the directory.xml files can be maintained manually.