Book Image

Asterisk 1.6

Book Image

Asterisk 1.6

Overview of this book

Asterisk is a powerful and flexible open source framework for building feature-rich telephony systems. As a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) which connects one or more telephones, and usually connects to one or more telephone lines, Asterisk offers very advanced features, including extension-to-extension calls, queues, ring groups, line trunking, call distribution, call detail rerecords, and call recording. This book will show you how to build a telephony system for your home or business using this open source application. 'Asterisk 1.6' takes you step-by-step through the process of installing and configuring Asterisk. It covers everything from establishing your deployment plan to creating a fully functional PBX solution. Through this book you will learn how to connect employees from all over the world as well as streamline your callers through Auto Attendants (IVR) and Ring Groups.This book is all you need to understand and use Asterisk to build the telephony system that meets your need. You will learn how to use the many features that Asterisk provides you with. It presents example configurations for using Asterisk in three different scenarios: for small and home offices, small businesses, and Hosted PBX. Over the course of ten chapters, this book introduces you to topics as diverse as Public Switched Telephony Network (PSTN), Voice over IP Connections (SIP / IAX), DAHDI, libpri, through to advanced call distribution, automated attendants, FreePBX, and asterCRM. With an engaging style and excellent way of presenting information, this book makes a complicated subject very easy to understand.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Asterisk 1.6
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
Preface

Chapter 9. Case Studies

Up to this point, we have worked through the setting up of a new phone system based on Asterisk. Our system has been developed with our specific needs in mind and has configurations and features enabled to fit our particular purposes. Often we will find ourselves wondering if we're making full use of the magic of Asterisk, and perhaps the best way to find new tricks is to examine examples of working phone systems.

What follows in this chapter are typical examples of just a few such systems. Each section will be devoted to one type of system. First, we will give a brief overview of the type of customers involved before we mention some pointers to remember as we decide what they need and how best to accomplish our task. Finally, we will go through the configuration files, one at a time. Each configuration file will be annotated, and we will briefly discuss why some of the choices are particularly good for the given scenario.

Small office/home office

This is a common setup...