Harondel J. Sibble typed the following on 7/27/2006 8:48 PM:
On 27 Jul 2006 at 15:29, Pete Holsberg wrote:
And I have no room to add another answering machine.
Hmmmm...maybe I could buy a bigger desk -- mine is only 4.5
feet wide -- and then I would have room. Would that be
simpler than using answering machine software??? ;-)
Honestly, yes. I've used most of the products on the market at
one point or another. Faxworks, Talkworks, Communicate Pro,
etc etc.
ALL of then have shortcomings of one kind or another. My PC
was my answering machine for almost 10 years, I stopped using
the PC for voicemail about 3 years ago. I started with
Faxworks on a windows 3.1 machine with 4 or 8mb of memory. I
would answer the call, take the message and thrash on the
drives processing each message for like 10 or 15 minutes :-(
Here's what you should expect with pc based voicemail EVEN if
you are used modems that are tested and certified by the
software publisher.
1) Line hung - caller hangs up, modem/software does not 2) No
answer - modem/software ignores incoming call
Those are the nice problems. In the 10 years I was using PC
based voicemail, I went through AT LEAST 50-75 voicemodems
trying to find the holy grail. I tried expensive ones, cheap
ones etc. Unix based voicemail applications have tended to be
a bit more robust in my experience than the MS Windows
counterparts.
I was using Symantec's Talkworks when I finally packed it in.
I still run it on my main desktop but ONLY for receiving
faxes.
The next voicemail machine I build with be based on the
opensource Asterisk and use certified hardware.
http://www.digium.com/en/index.php
Being that it also handles VoIP, it's pretty slick.
Thank you for addressing the software question instead of
proposing alternatives.
--
Pete Holsberg
Columbus, NJ
Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important
part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every
individual. State churches that use government power to support
themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths
undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of the
church tends to make the clergy unresponsive to the people and
leads to corruption within religion. Erecting the "wall of
separation between church and state," therefore, is absolutely
essential in a free society.
--Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826), speech, 1808
--
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