Chat feature. So I see how this works, and it is great. The only issue I see is that it isn't 100% useful unless all the phone users also use fop2 as well. A number of customers already use chat tools particularly between different offices, and I'm sure they are going to ask about using gtalk/hangouts/jabber/yahoo/trillian/skype ... you name it. I see where you have a extensible feature for sending SMS messages defined in the cfg file. is there any chance of being able to exchange IM's with gtalk etc using this ?

Not for now. Integrating it with other protocols/networks is a world in itself. Jabber would be the logical choice, but as we are talking about phones, we should be using sip simple? All of this is quite complex, so for now there won't be integrations being done. Newer asterisk have jabber/xmmp implementations, and they have some kind of integration with the Asterisk AMI (the interface fop2 uses), so maybe that is another path to explore.

2) the customastb parameter... It would be great to be able to work with the CF settings in the astdb. I'm not sure i see how to do that in our environment. Our CF settings (which are CF for unconditional, CFU for unavailabie, and CFB for busy) are used like so:

CF/120=1234456
CFB/140 = 130
CFU/150 = 123456

It is not clear how to use this, or at least how to do all three. can I have more than one customastb parameter ?
If not, then just having the unconditional CF is probably adequate. the other 2 are rarely used.

The customastdb setting as it is is only for monitoring the value and display an icon on the button if that value is set. In order to notify a change in real time, a user event must be fired. It works only with one setting, so you can very well use it already with either CF or CFU. And you will need to modify your dialplan macros that set/unset to also notify fop2 in realtime of the changes by using UserEvents. This is for clearing the entry:

exten => *79,n,UserEvent(FOP2ASTDB,Family: fop2state,Channel: ${CHAN},Value: )

And this for setting it:

exten => *78,n,UserEvent(FOP2ASTDB,Family: fop2state,Channel: ${CHAN},Value: Do not Disturb)

And if you want to be able to set/unset from FOP2. the set call forward plugin will let you set/unset the CF/xxx entries in your asterisk database. Plugin source can be modified to use CFU instead of CF.

Another question: I have email configured on a number of extensions... when I attempt to send email occasionally I get a screen refresh, once in a while I get an external mail window to open up, and once (on my phone,actually) I can a webpage cannot be located, with mailto:<emailaddress>? in the URL bar. How should it work ?

The email sending uses mailto links, that should open your mail software to write emails with it. If that fails, it is probably a browser issue, there is not much mistery about mailto links (the only thing that is different within fop2 is that the mailto link is fired via form to not disrupt the fop2 web session). Perhaps you need to configure your browser to use your preferred mail client for sending mail.