On Tue, 2006-03-28 at 05:43 -0500, B Nik wrote: > 1- I really want to know what you guys use. Do you use any of these > GUI helpers or do you use your own house-made system; or you guys just > like to use dry (apologies) linux environment and no GUI.I am at a > level that I would like to use Asterisk for production. > Bruce, I started with Asterisk a year and a half ago with a base asterisk install, a Digium card and a sampling of handsets. I am a Linux consultant so nothing on the Linux side was anything more than work. My entire learning curve was on Asterisk, Polycom, and VoIP in general.
I'm glad I started out the way that I did. I had to code my own
dial-plan from scratch. I started with the default plan from the tarball
and went form there. That was a great learning experience and was
instrumental in my success with [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I have since switched to [EMAIL PROTECTED] for several reasons:
1. It has a far better default dial plan that includes way more features
than a base asterisk dialplan. I know that I could have slowly crafted
my own, over time, but this was much easier and problem fixes and
enhancements will come with upgrades.
2. Since I'm new at the telephony side of this, my customers are small
and non-technical. I like the idea of giving them some control over the
phone systems. That was one of our selling points, that Asterisk and
VoIP give more control to the owner.
3. It saves a lot of time installing. In one tarball, I can install a
full-featured base PBX in about an hour of my time. That includes a wide
range of tools far above what I would normally install.
Some caveats though:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] is a trade off. I would normally create a company greeting
that was
comprised of several individual prompts so that I could re-arrange them
or insert new prompts within them (e.g. to insert an after hours
message, or to change the hours of operation). The AMP interface that
[EMAIL PROTECTED] uses wants a single audio file to act as the entire greeting
message. This is fine for companies that will record their own greeting,
but it would be more cumbersome/costly to have Allison Smith record such
long greetings, or to combine separate greetings in a single audio file.
Also complex dialplans must still be hand coded in [EMAIL PROTECTED] and may
break in
future out-of-the-box dialplans. Despite this I was able to customize
how voice mail is handled (i.e. present the user with an option to leave
voice mail, wait for an answer, dial another extension.)
Support for configuring Polycom phones is missing. It would be nice to
have a GUI XML editor to be able to edit the polycom config files and a
GUI tool for DHCP. Something like: Scan in the phone MAC address and
assign an IP, extension, name, etc.
For me the trade offs are worth it. I can always code a work-around in
AMP to deal with what I don't like and submit it to the maintainers.
> 2- I would like to know if you guys used any of the above billing or
> web management solutions and which one you thought was the best.
> Specially Full systems, Billing, and Web managements that I mentioned
> above.
I have not use the billing, although our customers do use the CDR
reporting. AMP, FOP, and MeetMe are the tools I intend to use from here
on. If they don't suit I'll code around them and hope that the changes
are accepted by the maintainers.
>
--
John Van Ostrand
Net Direct Inc.
Director of Technology
564 Weber St. N. Unit 12
Waterloo, ON N2L 5C6
map
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Ph: 519-883-1172
ext.5102
Linux Solutions / IBM
Hardware
Fx: 519-883-8533
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