Presence with Asterisk

Aaron Rosenthal — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:42:45 +0000

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 desk phone, and when you’re out of the office calls are automatically routed to your cell…its like magic.

Bluetooth is the primary technology that makes all this possible since most cell phones these days have bluetooth, plus it’s the perfect proximity based technology that just happen to be in our cell phones; ideal for presence. Here’s an article by Little Nerds which discusses how to get presence up and running specifically with Asterisk.

To make this work in a much larger office, and to have it work for an entire user population, I think it would be a great idea for handset manufacturers to start incorporating bluetooth into their phones for this very purpose. This way my desk phone is what recognizes my presence and the IP PBX could route calls accordingly even if I were in the office but not at my desk. I wonder if you could combine presence with extension mobility… that might be excessive!

Has anyone gotten presence to work with Asterisk using something other than Bluetooth?

Asterisk & Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 integration

Aaron Rosenthal — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:23:18 +0000

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 ready to deploy for a large enterprise organizations. So until that happens, we’re integrating with other Unified Communication solutions which really isn’t that bad. One such example is Asterisk integration with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 which was discussed in detail by Tom Keating on the TMCnet blog.

As much as us Open Source folks probably loath working with anything Microsoft, and as much as I myself try to always find the Open Source alternative to any business application, I think this could be an interesting and compelling UC integration for selling Asterisk into enterprise organizations. Most big businesses aren’t ready to ditch their proprietary software nor are they ready to kick out the Microsoft guy who sits on their board, so by integrating Asterisk with OCS 2007, you can somewhat sideline some of the Open Source concerns while still deploying an IP PBX in the background that is based on Asterisk. I hate to say it, but Microsoft OCS has a pretty sexy user interface and unlike Cisco Call Manager which is also sexy, Microsoft OCS will at least integrate with Asterisk.

It looks like this type of integration is still in its early stages and there’s certainly some bugs to be ironed out. For example, Asterisk uses SIP over UDP while OCS 2007 uses SIP over TCP. There are workarounds available but sometime soon I’m sure that Asterisk will support SIP over TCP while at the same time OCS 2007 should soon use SIP over UDP, both of which sound to be in the works.

I’d be interested to hear from this community whether anyone has already done some work with Asterisk and OCS 2007. What other hurdles did you encounter and how well has this integration been received? I’m sure soon we’ll be doing this type of integration as a fantastic means to continue deploying Asterisk to satisfy the communication requirements of large enterprises but either way this is all just another testament to Asterisk ability to integrate with almost anything!

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Presence with Asterisk

Asterisk & Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 integration