As we discussed when introducing Asterisk, flexibility is a primary focus. Asterisk can be used for a variety of different purposes and each available feature can be tailored to the specific needs of any organization. Trixbox retains some of the flexibility and adds a massive amount of convenience and ease of use. It offers web-based configuration, web access to voicemail, reporting, and other functions, which we will cover shortly. All these functions can be added to your own Asterisk installation as they are all based on existing Asterisk tools. The real benefit of Trixbox is that you don't have to set these up manually to make them work together. Trixbox installs and sets up the base configuration for all of the tools it provides.
It's extremely easy to set up and use. The downside to this is that you lose some of the flexibility. For example, you can't choose which OS to base your Asterisk system on and you can't fully customize the configuration, which becomes a hindrance in...