When we talk about Unified Communications, we must talk about integrating devices and services into one working ecosystem.
Unified Communications involve terms such as Computer-Telephony Integration (CTI) and Telephony Application Programming Interface (TAPI). These concepts enable the use of telephony services (IP-PBX) in computers with a variety of operating systems.
The list of programs that integrate a PC with our IP-PBX is quite long. There are programs that require a paid license and others that are free and based on the GPL. Some are for 32-bit operating systems, and others are for 64-bit operating systems. Some of them even work with Linux and Mac.
Tip
To learn more about Asterisk and TAPI, please visit: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+TAPI or search on the Internet.
For this recipe, we will work with Outcall, which can be downloaded from: http://outcall.sourceforge.net/
The benefit of this program is that we can make a call from Outlook's main screen...