I just got some tutorial chapters from PackT Publishing’s AsteriskNOW book by Nir Simionovich. Although most OS-VoIP readers aren’t developers, and the ones who are probably rarely use AsteriskNOW, I figured there’s no harm in putting these up even if only a few people find the chapters useful.

Here are the two chapters extracted from the PackT AsteriskNOW book:

Chapter 5 - Tentacles of the PBX — The Calling Rules Tables
Chapter 7 - “For Annoyance, Press 1″ — Voice Menus and IVR

It seems that AsteriskNOW has largely been neglected by Digium ever since they purchased Switchvox. AsteriskNOW was Digium’s first attempt to an easy to use administrative interface to the Asterisk software but once Switchvox came into the picture it seems their engineering resources went away from the AsteriskNOW UI and into the Switchvox UI. This move obviously makes business sense since Switchvox is a real revenue generator for Digium yet I hope they soon re-direct some focus towards the eventual development of a comprehensive OS UI for Asterisk.

To date, there still does not exist (to my knowledge) a suitable Open Source Asterisk UI which I’d feel comfortable implementing in a large scale IP PBX. There are certainly plenty of Asterisk UI flavors but most have been created as a licensed product. In a perfect Wallgreens world, Digium or some other knight in shining armor will engineer an open source UI for administration and a UI for users; one which is reliable regardless of scale or clustering, and one which is Open Source. This would certainly result in the eventual nail in the coffin for many proprietary IP PBX systems. So far the closest I’ve found is Druid by Voiceroute which is still a work in progress.