only in section VoIP Asterisk

Announcing PBX-in-a-Flash: A New Asterisk Platform for Everyman… and Woman!

Filed under:

• Technology
• Telephony
• Smartphones

— ward @ 7:00 am

We’ve been keeping a low profile for a few weeks, and now it’s time to let the cat out of the bag. As some of you know, we just haven’t been thrilled with the direction of the trixbox project lately. Without boring everyone with a lot of detail, suffice it to say that it’s just gotten a little too proprietary, too closed, and too commercial for our open source, puritanical tastes. So today, with a bunch of help from some really sharp folks, we embark upon a new open source project that we hope will become the best-of-breed Asterisk-based development platform. Our design goals are simple: a very modular system that meets the needs of Asterisk experimenters as well as those looking for a reliable, scalable, IP-based business telephony solution with all the bells and whistles.

Our up front promise is to keep the project open, participatory, reliable, and fun. After all, that’s what the Asterisk revolution was and is all about. The plan is to provide a free ISO-based offering for home or office use that will run on a dedicated Linux machine. There also will be a VMware image that will run on a Windows desktop. And, for the Mac desktop, we’ll provide both a VMware and a Parallels image. Down the road, when you get sick of babysitting your own hardware and worrying about fault tolerance and backups, there will be a transparent option to migrate your entire system to a dedicated, hosted service with very reasonable pricing for one trunk or hundreds. The system can be scaled to meet almost every business need. And, if you ever want to reverse-migrate back to a system that you maintain, that option will be available as well. The hosted option is about 1 millisecond off the Internet backbone in Atlanta so we’re doubtful there will be a lot of reverse migrations.

The free ISO-based offering as well as the hosted alternative will include a bucket of minutes for some free calls in the U.S. to get you started. You can add your own providers at any time or provide a credit card and continue to use the preconfigured services. For the desktop, both the ISO-based and hosted offerings will include instructions for use of a preconfigured softphone. Or you can purchase an auto-configurable phone.

As for the ISO-image, it’ll have all your favorites: CentOS 5, Asterisk 1.4, FreePBX, Apache, MySQL, PHP, phpMyAdmin, SendMail, Perl, Flite, and, of course, all of the Nerd Vittles Goody Bag: weather forecasts by zip code, airport code, and international forecasts as well as the NewsClips news reader, the MailCall email reader, AsteriDex phone directory, TeleYapper, Telephone Reminder System, Podcast Studio, and more. Everything else is optional. There will be free scripts to install every Asterisk-compatible application on the planet. Can you add your own stuff? Absolutely. Can you help by adding stuff to the PBX-in-a-Flash repository? We hope you will. And, last but not least, there’s a new Nerd Vittles Forum where you can get lots of help at no cost when you get stumped. Sign up now, and you’ll be all set. We’re all ears for suggestions already!

Show Me the Beef. Yeah. We wish it were ready today, too. But we’re shooting for early November unless we eat too much candy on Halloween. Either way, it won’t be long. Can we tell you who all the players are today? Well, we could, but then we’d have to shoot you. So hang in there for a couple more weeks, and we’ll have the first beta for you to sink your teeth into.

NEWS FLASH!! It’s here. Download it today. And here’s the article to show you how to install and use it.