Asterisk Open Source PBX

posted by Allan@TechCrammer @ 10:14pm, Sunday 2 November 2008.

We have two (very old, though trustworthy) Merlin 820D systems that we use for all of our office phones. Each system can take up to 8 regular (analog) inbound lines and handle up to 20 phones. They are easy to program (once you get the hang of it) and do not require alot of power to run, like some of the larger PBXs.

There are many standard features like on-hold, intercom, transfer, and conferencing that we can use and suffices most requirements. We also have an external Voice Mail system that handles this separately.

With the rise of newer technology it seems that there are some "bells & whistles" that we are still missing. VOIP / telephony being the most prominent, lending to soft phones for employees while traveling or working from home.

Researching this we found many commercial PBXs and Key Systems that were very feature rich and also way beyond our budget. Then we stumbled across the Asterisk.org project which is surprisingly Open Source and comes with an abundance of features right out of the box.

The only catch, if you really want to call it a catch, is that you will need to purchase their Digium equipment, or other compatible cards. However, the pricing is very reasonable on this equipment in comparison to most of the telecommunications products I have researched.

There are way too many features to get into with this post, and a whole community of developers and add-on modules constantly being worked. This is a very large scale effort and they host different AstriCon meetings to bring key ideas and recognition to the project. Though the main focus for us is the VOIP which we can mix with our current analog lines as well. They also have developed there own IAX protocol to use for softphones and a brilliant little device called the IAXy; that you can plug into the Internet on one end and a standard phone on the other.

One of the other nice features, is the built-in voicemail system that integrates with your call scripting. They have built some GUIs around alot of the service, though it requires a bunch of internal call processing text files, with their own formatting that you may need some time to get used to, if you really want to get behind the scenes of the application.

Overall this is certainly a nice product to watch and we may be making the change here. Right now we have a demo PC running with a couple analog cards for testing. I will post back if we decide to go production with this.

Nice talking to you.

-Allan

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