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

What's new in Asterisk 1.4?


Since the last edition of this book, Asterisk has come out with two major releases—1.4 and 1.6. The new features of Asterisk 1.4 are as follows:

  • Pass through ITU standard T.38 fax calls: Asterisk now supports the passthrough of fax transmissions to a fax machine.

  • IM support for Jabber and Google Talk: IM software that supports the Jingle protocol can now be connected to Asterisk.

  • Whisper paging: This is a new feature of call barging, which allows a user to listen-in on a phone conversation and speak. However, the person listening into the conversation cannot hear the conversation. This feature allows an assistant to talk to someone else in the same office when they're on a call. For example, conveying time-sensitive or important information without the person on the other end hearing what’s being said.

  • Improved sound prompts (English, French, and Spanish): Digium re-recorded all the sound prompts and included higher quality sound files.

  • Generic jitter buffer: In the past, the jitter buffer was developed just for the IAX protocol. In this new release, Asterisk now supports other VoIP protocols such as SIP and TDM interfaces.

  • Shared Line Appearance: This feature mimics the traditional PBX Key Systems, allowing subscribers to share external lines (VoIP, ISDN, PSTN), and also provides status monitoring of the shared line. When a user places an outgoing call using such an appearance, all members belonging to that particular SLA group are notified of this usage. They are also blocked from using this line appearance until the line goes back to idle state or the call is placed on hold.

  • Built-in voicemail system: In the past, you could either store voicemail as files on the Asterisk server or on an external database. Now voicemail can be retrieved through IMAP on any IMAP-compliant storage system. One benefit of this is unified messaging. This means you can now read a message in your email client and once it is marked read, you will see the MWI (Message Waiting Indicator) switched off on your phone.

For a complete list of changes since Asterisk 1.2, visit: http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk/tags/1.4.0/CHANGES.