Blinkey Light

Having laid out my needs and wants in a IP-PBX here, let’s take a look at the platforms themselves, shall we? For the sake of convenience, I’ll divide them into No-Cost and Cost sections.

In the No-Cost section we have basic Asterisk, trixbox CE, trixbox Pro Standard, and PBX-In-A-Flash. By “No-Cost” I mean that the IP-PBX software won’t cost you anything. You still have to provide server hardware to run the system and buy all the phones and such, but you won’t incur any software costs. Digium (who owns the Asterisk brand now) distributes an official Asterisk package for free.

While you can certainly install Asterisk on your favorite Linux distro, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all, I was looking for more of an all-in-one install. I wanted to download an ISO, burn it to CD, drop it in the drive and go. AsteriskNOW is the basically that, using rPath linux and vanilla Asterisk. It’s as close to a basic Linux+Asterisk as anything and that’s probably why I felt the least comfortable with it. I think it’s a great platform, and hugely extensible. Someone with more familiarity with both Linux and Asterisk could probably make better use of it than me. Sadly, my Nix-Fu is weak.

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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…..