Asterisk: The Future of Telephony: The Future of Telephony

by Van Meggelen, Jim

• ISBN13: 9780596510480
• ISBN10: 0596510489
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-08-01
• Publisher: Oreilly & Associates Inc

Summary

This bestselling book is now the standard guide to building phone systems with Asterisk, the open source IP PBX that has traditional telephony providers running scared! Revised for the 1.4 release of the software, the new edition of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony reveals how you can save money on equipment and support, and finally be in control of your telephone system. If you've worked with telephony in the past, you're familiar with the problem: expensive and inflexible systems that are tuned to the vendor's needs, not yours. Asterisk isn't just a candle in the darkness, it's a whole fireworks show. Because Asterisk is so powerful, configuring it can seem tricky and difficult. This book steps you through the process of installing, configuring, and integrating Asterisk with your existing phone system. You'll learn how to write dialplans, set up applications including speech synthesis and voice recognition, how to script Asterisk, and much more -- everything you need to design a simple but complete system with little or no Asterisk experience, and no more than rudimentary telecommunications knowledge.

Author Biography

Jim Van Meggelen is President and CTO of Core Telecom Innovations, a Canadian-based provider of open-source telephony solutions. He has over fifteen years of enterprise telecom experience, for such companies as Nortel, Williams and Telus, and has has extensive knowledge of both legacy and VoIP equipment from manufacturers such as Nortel, Cisco and Avaya.

Jim was the architect of two of the world's largest managed enterprise voice networks; each solution serving roughly twenty-thousand users in more than one-thousand communities across Canada, providing telecommunications in five different languages, through six time zones, administered completely from a central location. These networks pioneered the use of extensive automation and database control in a branch voice network - functionalities not generally available in proprietary telecommunications systems. Jim has now moved on from the world of proprietary telecom, and is commited to open-source telephony.

Jim is one of the principal contributors to the Asterisk Documentation Project, and is co-author of the bestselling O'Reilly book, Asterisk: The Future of Telephony. He enjoys teaching, public speaking, improvisational acting, and writing.

Jared Smith is a long time member of the Asterisk community, and a co-founder of the Asterisk Documentation Project. Jared has over a decade of systems administration and programming experience, along with several years of professional telephony and voice-over-IP experience. As the architect of one of the world's largest Asterisk installations, he has a wealth of hands-on Asterisk knowledge. Jim Van Meggelen is President and CTO of Core Telecom Innovations, a Canadian-based provider of open-source telephony solutions. He has over fifteen years of enterprise telecom experience, for such companies as Nortel, Williams and Telus, and has extensive knowledge of both legacy and VoIP equipment from manufacturers such as Nortel, Cisco and Avaya. Jim is one of the principal contributors to the Asterisk Documentation Project. Leif Madsen first took an interest in Asterisk while attempting to find a voice conferencing solution for him and his friends. After someone suggested trying Asterisk, the obsession began. Wanting to contribute and be involved with the community, and noticing the lack of Asterisk documentation, he co-founded the Asterisk Documentation Project.

Leif Madsen first took an interest in Asterisk while attempting to find a voice conferencing solution for him and his friends. After someone suggested trying Asterisk, the obsession began. Wanting to contribute and be involved with the community, and noticing the lack of Asterisk documentation, he co-founded the Asterisk Documentation Project. Leif is currently working as a consultant, specializing in Asterisk clustering and call-centre integration. You can get more information at http://www.leifmadsen.com

Table of Contents

A telephony revolution	p. 1
Preparing a system for Asterisk	p. 11
Installing Asterisk	p. 37
Initial configuration of asterisk	p. 69
Dialplan basics	p. 119
More dialplan concepts	p. 145
Understanding telephony	p. 167
Protocols for VoIP	p. 185
The Asterisk gateway interface (AGI)	p. 207
Asterisk manager interface (AMI) and adhearsion	p. 227
The Asterisk GUI framework	p. 245
Relational database integration	p. 263
Managing your asterisk system	p. 293
Potpourri	p. 303
Asterisk : the future of telephony	p. 317
VoIP channels	p. 337
Application reference	p. 367
AGI reference	p. 449
Configuration files	p. 461
Asterisk dialplan functions	p. 493
Asterisk manager interface actions	p. 515
An example of funcöodbc	p. 551
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.