In addition to connecting to external conversation gateways, Openfire can also interact with a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service, if you have one in your network. In this section, we'll see how you can hook up your Openfire setup with Asterisk.
Note
I'm assuming that you have an Asterisk VoIP server setup. If you don't, there is lots of online documentation that'll help. In addition, there's also Packt's Asterisk title—Building Telephony Systems With Asterisk. If you are new to Asterisk, I'd suggest you grab the TrixBox VMware image [http://www.trixbox.org/downloads] that provides a ready-to-use Asterisk environment.
To connect Openfire to your Asterisk setup, you need the Asterisk-IM plugin. For Asterisk-IM to work, you'll have to enable the Asterisk Manager and add a user for Openfire. It's up to the Asterisk Manager to allow a client program such as Openfire to connect to an Asterisk instance and issue commands or read phone events over the network.
The...