One thought on - Open Source Pbx Free

• installed

  Many of us on this list have experience running call centers off of Asterisk, myself included. If you haven’t done Asterisk before, you might want to bring in some outside help in order to smooth over the process. It isn’t that you can’t do it on your own, but expect there to be something of a steep learning curve. If you haven’t had experience with VOIP before, you will run into issues that you didn’t even know were possible, and in a call center scenario, you will have people breathing down your neck wanting things fixed/changed.

  The great thing about Asterisk is that if you know what you are doing, you can pretty much bend it to your will. It isn’t perfect (no software is), but there have been very few requests from end users that I haven’t been able to fulfill once I understood what they really wanted. Phone systems are big and scary and hard for technical people. Most non-techies don’t know enough about them to even know the right questions to ask. That’s why your very first job is to find out what does the client really want/need their phone system to do. Call center of 10 users gives you a direction to go in, but it isn’t enough to design the phone system. You need to find out what exactly do they want to happen when a call comes in. How should it be routed. Are they going to use call queues? By indicating a call center it is likely they will, but I have seen it where they don’t.

  Once you have your requirements mostly decided, then you can go ahead and decide on what to do next. If it will fit the bill, especially for a new asterisk user, there are many prebuilt distributions that will make setting up and maintaining your Asterisk solution easier. They have nice web interfaces to handle all the heavy lifting. As you sound pretty new to VOIP, this may be the way you want to go. If they don’t meet your needs, then you may be into custom programming the dialplan and gets a lot more involved.

  Good luck and enjoy the journey. Also, the more specific you can make your questions, the better and more likely the fine folks on this board will be to respond with helpful information.