Blinkey Light

I’ve been working for the past couple of months on putting together an Asterisk IP-PBX for the purpose of replacing my company’s aging traditional PBX system. Briefly, for those unfamiliar with the concept, an IP-PBX does everything a normal PBX system does, but it talks to the phones over your data network using TCP/IP. There are IP-PBX systems made by Cisco and Shoretel and a few others that are quite impressive but they tend to be either expensive or extremely expensive.

So I’ve turned to Asterisk. Asterisk is an Open Source IP-PBX built on top of Linux. Like most platforms built on Linux, you have a wealth of options to choose from when putting together your own system, to the point that I am lost most of the time. So far, I’ve looked at trixbox (CE and Pro), PBX-in-a-Flash, AsteriskNOW, Druid ECS, and Thirdlane Advantage.

My ultimate plan for this is to replace all our PBX’s for all 5 sites with a comprehensive system with some key features. Least Cost Routing is a must. I have to be able to route calls from any extension at any site out of the most efficient (cheapest) trunk. I have one site in remote Northern California and the call rates out of there are killing me. Line Failover is another must-have. The copper going into one of my sites is TERRIBLE. We have regular outages on either the voice PRI or the data T-1, though neither at the same time. Auto-provisioning Phones is nearly a must, I don’t want to be hand-configuring phones. Reliable Support is the last. Whether it’s paid support from the vendor or an active community of Open Source people, I need to know I can go to someone to ask questions when I get lost.

I have a couple of desired-but-not-needed features in mind too. 4-digit dial between sites, Outlook integration for dial-by-name, telecommuter extensions, fax support. Those are just icing though.

This has gotten too long, so I’ll break it up into a few pieces. Stay tuned…..