Introduction

Asterisk has taken the telecommunications industry by storm, providing a low cost alternative to closed and proprietary PBX systems.  Asterisk has all of the functionality of much higher cost systems such as Cisco Call Manager, Broadsoft's Broadworks, and other large phone system vendors.  In fact in the last 3 years at SinglePoint Networks we have never had to tell a customer "That can't be done".  The flexibility and open nature of Asterisk provide end users, businesses, and service providers with the ability to execute their telecommunications strategies without incurring unnecessary costs.

In the 3 years that we have been implementing Asterisk based solutions we have found that integrating other software applicaitons, databases, and web applications into Asterisk is very easy and straight forward.  Providing advanced features which are not necessarily "built-in" to Asterisk is also relatively easy due to the open nature of the system.  The purpose of this blog-book is to document and highlight the strengths of the Asterisk system.  We will provide the reader with a basis in the technologies and configuration of an Asterisk system and then we will provide examples used in actual deployments from small 5 person offices up to 100 user call center solutions and service provider installations.

At SinglePoint Networks we use Polycom phones and regularly implement the FreePBX GUI.  The examples provided herein will show both command line configuration examples as well as GUI configuration samples.  All handset specific configuration are Polycom configuration examples.