I stumbled upon this article on eWeek which was written by Sangoma CEO, David Mandelstam. This short paper discusses a few things that I consistently have to re-iterate to every client when selling an Asterisk based PBX. Hopefully now this article should save me some time.
It is articles like these that truly help out the [...]

Presence is one of those nifty little features that just totally impresses the heck out of most users… and it’s entirely possible with Asterisk+bluetooth. Presence is the ability for the IP PBX to recognize when someone’s in or out of the office. When you’re in the office, the IP PBX will route calls to your [...]

So I just heard from my Polycom guy today that as of yesterday the Polycom IP670 phone is available for order. I had a few things to say about this phone in a previous blog here, but now that it’s available I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we get one to play [...]

So last week Counterpath released a new audio conferencing solution called Quick Conference (QC). The Counterpath Eyebeam softphones have always been our softphone of choice with Asterisk and QC works just as well. Conferencing isn’t anything new to Asterisk and for a company with mild conferencing requirements, having control via handset over conference calls is [...]

Just today I stumbled on this article written by Flavio E. Goncalves which compares Asterisk and OpenSER. It’s a short and concise article worth sharing with you all. Here’s a few snippets.
“If you work with IP telephony, it’s quite possible that you have not heard about OpenSER, but certainly you must have heard about Asterisk. [...]

In the spirit of exploring the capabilities of Asterisk beyond its typical use as an IP PBX, external paging is a great feature to increase the value of your Asterisk system by having it assume the functionality typically reserved for a distinctly separate system and additional investment. Most people configure Asterisk systems for paging via [...]

Digium has just announced the release of their new AA300 Appliance. This new appliance replaces the AA350NR and have a few additional advantages over its predecessor. According to Digium, here are some of the highlights:
* More Versatile: The AA300 can be rack mounted or wall mounted. Please note that the AA300 ships with rack handles [...]

One of the things I want to do with this blog is explore all the wild applications in which Asterisk is being used under-the-hood. Rarely do people advertise the use of Asterisk in their VoIP products so here’s one business where Asterisk was just right for a very unique application.
Although they’ve been around for over [...]

As more and more organizations wise up to what Asterisk could mean for their communication needs, I’ve noticed that the hospitality industry is one that is coming to surface with some unique requirements (like many industries) which I’d like to discuss and get some feedback.
First and foremost, unique billing requirements is one of the most [...]

I still find it surprising the number of IT directors and CIO’s who still have no idea what SIP is. This is mostly the case with SMB businesses but even if you’re a small multi-site organization, you’re not doing anyone justice by ignoring new technologies. Because I run into so many people who don’t have [...]

This isn’t new news as I’ve been following these folks for months but they’re worth mentioning on this blog because I like the concept of a Visual Dialplan. I honestly don’t think this is going to become the widely adopted method for configuring an Asterisk system but it’s still pretty neat.
APSTEL’s Visual Dialplan is a [...]

One of the biggest hurdles a company faces when deploying new technologies is the re-training of an entire user population. This is a much larger task when implementing something like a new ERP or even a CRM solution but one must not underestimate that users can also be slow to learning new phones.
Normally a phone [...]

Some people might consider it sacrilege to mention a company like Microsoft in a community like this but I’m going to anyway… live with it. I’m still waiting for Digium to roll out some sort of Unified Communications solution to Asterisk besides Switchvox which is in my opinion a completely different breed that I’m not [...]

The eventual evolution of VoIP is going to break into the mobile market and go mainstream sometime very soon… unless networks start banning VoIP but that’s just stupid. The idea behind mobile VoIP is to make and receive voice calls over your data plan. With unlimited data plans standard with most carriers, this means unlimited [...]

I’m a huge Open Source fan and as much as I like using my SugarCRM, SalesForce has some great stuff (and obviously their software extends well beyond just CRM). SalesForce is arguably the driver behind the SaaS bandwagon and I really like what they’re doing…. even though it’s all proprietary. I recently got to demo [...]

Almost halfway through 2008 and already we’re seeing Asterisk everywhere. Asterisk has permeated almost every market in which VoIP is used, from the small business market to the carrier space. The question is, where is Asterisk going to pull ahead in 2008 and in what market? The past 12 months leading up to this point [...]