How to use SIPoint as a softphone switch?
June 12th, 2009 by Wei ChenSIPoint Presence Server is an integrated SIP Registrar, Proxy, Presence and XCAP server. It supports most key SIP standards as well as SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leverage Extensions.
Because of its integrated capabilities, it is very easy to use SIPoint to create a simple SIP switch for softphones like X-Lite to support voice, instant messaging, and presence.
System Overview
Here is how the system looks like. Bob, Alice, and John’s soft-phones are all connected to SIPoint via the local network within the same domain. For this example, let’s call the domain is example.com.

SIPoint Configuration
SIPoint has to be configured to manage the example.com domain. Here are the step-by-step instructions.
- Download SIPoint Installer from Micromethod website if you haven’t done so.
- Install SIPoint on a server (Linux/Windows/Mac) that is on a LAN with all the softphones.
- Start SIPoint by running startup.[sh | bat] from where SIPoint is installed. If this is the first time you run SIPoint, SIPoint should automatically populate its embedded database with all the default configurations.
- Now you should be able to access SIPoint’s Management Console at http://localhost:8080 from the server where SIPoint is installed. You log in with default name and password – admin/admin.
- The initial page of SIPoint’s Web Management Console gives you the system information.
- Click the
node to get the general server configuration, including the default domains SIPoint manages. Add “example.com” to the list of Responsible Domains and select it as the default domain, as shown in the picture below. Please make sure you click the
button to add the domain and click the
button to make the changes persisted.
Softphone Configuration
Now you can configure the SIP-based softphones. Please note that softphones have to support SIMPLE in order to use the presence and instant messaging features. Regardless the SIMPLE support, voice communication should work as long as the softphones are RFC 3261 compliant.
Each softphone should be configured to use SIPoint as the default SIP Registrar and Proxy. Here is how you configure the X-Lite softphone on John’s machine.
- Configure the SIP account for John as the following. Please note the names are case sensitive.
- Configure the Presence to use Presence Agent mode.
- Add Bob (or Alice) as one of your contacts as the following. Make sure you enable “Show contact’s Availability” to enable presence.
Similarly you can configure Bob and Alice’s softphones and add the appropriate contacts.
Now you have a small SIP network with SIPoint Server as the switch. John, Bob, and Alice should be able to call and send instant messages to each other and see the other people’s presence.
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Tags: Presence, SIMPLE, SIP, SIPoint
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