[ale] Asterisk for

[Jim Lynch]

On 10/21/2010 04:09 PM, Ben Coleman wrote:
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> I'd like to pick the brains of some of the Asterisk admins here.
>
> We're looking at setting up a PBS for our work situation, where most of
> of work out of our own home offices.  We'd like something where the call
> comes in (over some kind of VOIP line), goes into a call tree, and call
> the appropriate person (as my business partner puts it, 'The automated
> answering system should be able to take (eventually; but not immediately
> required) IVR and (immediately) touch tone directives from the caller,
> poll available lines and route the call to earliest available company
> representative, that would authorized to take the stated "call type"').
>
> Would Asterisk work for this?  Particularly, would Asterisk running on,
> say, a Linode slice work for this (we'd rather not have this sitting
> behind one of the DSL lines at someone's home).  Would some other open
> source PBX software work better?
>
> To add spice to this, my business partner has said we'd like to have
> something where, rather than pumping all calls through the PBX for the
> duration of the call, somehow the call would instead be re-routed so
> that once a target phone has been selected, the call would go direct
> from the caller to the target phone, without the PBX being in the
> middle.  I'm not even sure if the telephone system allows such a thing.
>   Thoughts?
>
> Ben
>    
Chris makes a good point.  Unless you're up for doing a bit of learning 
and you're already knowledgeable in telephony, hiring someone may be a 
better and far quicker choice.  That said, I dumped Asterisk for 
FreeSwitch.  It's a cleaner implementation, the support is better (IHMO) 
and it continues to work with out constant tweaking, which Asterisk 
couldn't do for me.

Cons are that the GUI isn't as nice as Trixbox, it doesn't have some of 
the more esoteric features as Asterisk and it's newer.

Pros are the configuration makes a whole lot more sense than Asterisk 
ever did, Zaptel integration works better (for me) and the authors are 
very active in the support arena.

Jim.