I'm going to add my two cents to this conversation as its now taken many turns. This thread has produced quite a bit of good dialog, even though some of it may not be viewed as such.
I've been playing with Asterisk now for a couple of months both at home and at work in our Test Environment. I (and therefore my company) first became interested in Asterisk because of the functionality it offers at a reduced cost. We're not searching for a 'free' product, just one that doesn't cost an arm and a leg to implement. I'm coming at this from a business perspective, not a programmer/geek/nerd perspective. I'm very versed in Data Networking, but am not a programmer. Currently, we have a traditional PBX (Nortel) that is stable. It offers basic Queue functions and primitive Queue reporting, but little else. We felt the need to implement an IVR system that would allow us to identify customers calling in before sending the call to an agent. With IVR, we can also allow the customer to do account balance lookups without human intervention (just like your credit card company). A large and well-known CTI/IVR vendor recently quoted between $300,000 and $480,000 to implement that same technology for our 120 Queue Agents with a system that smelled an awful lot like Asterisk tied (probably via trunk cards) to our traditional PBX. Another really attractive benefit of Asterisk (or VoIP in general) is that we can communicate with our remote offices scattered around the US over the Internet (probably VPN) for a fraction of the current cost of traditional POTs lines. With that ability, we can add Remote Agents to the ACD Queues (not currently possible with a traditional ACD Queue), and allow them to take advantage of our volume-based negotiated Long Distance rates for out-bound calls. So, the point that I'm trying to get to is that the product needs the exposure to the business folks who make the decisions before it can be implemented. Programmers rarely have the power to persuade the decision makers to make such a drastic move. Everyone agrees that Asterisk is attractive to the business people as described above. But, if Asterisk's documentation cannot speak to those same business people, it will never gain acceptance! Technology for the sake of technology is just useless. Technology that solves a business problem should be the focus. Asterisk is definitely cool technology! But...it's development and documentation needs to be aimed towards the business folks who would really use it, not the geeks like myself playing with it in their basement. Rich made the comment earlier on this thread that belittling newbies and telling them to read the code isn't the answer. Especially if those newbies are the ones who have a business need, and the power to make decisions! Asterisk has come to a point where it can attract some real users, let's make it easy for those users to get a system running so they'll become productive users (and therefore paying customers). For the record, in our Test Environment, we have been able to create a system with ACD Queues that prompts callers for their customer number, then tags Remedy (Call Ticket application) for that customer's recent call history. The system then pops up the Remedy Call Log and the phone call to the agent at the same time. We're currently working on the Account Balance Lookup feature that would be a true use of IVR and not require any human intervention. I'm about to the point of being ready to recommend this for a small pilot test, but cannot do so (in a Production Environment) without two things. 1) Redundancy so as to ensure 99.9% uptime; and 2) some form of commercial support to ensure that problems are addressed rapidly and professionally. To meet those requirements, I believe it might behoove Digium to adapt Red Hat's (or MySQL, or EMIC) business strategy. From a corporate standpoint, I (our company) would be willing to pay for support and probably implementation if it were offered. The dollars quoted above are what Asterisk is competing against. I'm sorry that this post is so long, but I want to ensure that Asterisk, Digium, and it's developers and supporters recognize who the product really should be aimed at. There's some risk, but there's also a lot of benefit to be gained by aiming at the Corporate Decision Makers who are tired of being pushed around by Commercial Vendors who want to charge too much for too little. I believe Asterisk could become a prevalent as Apache, MySQL, SendMail, etc. Thank you for listening! Joe Dennick IS Operations Director Securities America Financial Corporation [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Grzegorz Nosek Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2003 4:05 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] FAQ, Documentation, How-to, etc On Thu, 20 Nov 2003 00:47:08 -0500, Dorian Gray wrote > I yammered: > > of public resources such as this list. put that FAQ in the list > > subscribe welcome message or the list sig or the asterisk README or > > handbook or all of the above... > > er, in case it wasn't obvious: s/that FAQ/a link to that FAQ/ I am all > for svng prcs bndwdth. Actually a full FAQ sent to all newcomers to the list would be quite useful, I think. As in: I subscribe to the mailing list and the first message I get is the list FAQ (but no-one else sees it, naturally), together with a link to the Wiki, digium's documentation site etc. Alternatively, reading the FAQ might be obligatory to subscribe (must click though it to actually subscribe). my 0.02PLN _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
