Asterisk & hard pbx nexpan xl (MATRA)?

our enterprise would like to migrate “softly” to asterisk. In a first time, we would just like to put it before the hard pbx & its pstn gateway in order to survey outbound & inbound calls, blacklisting numbers etc…

is there a way it can be done so that asterisk automatically recuperate the pbx’s settings? we dont really want to config everythning from a new for 120 analog lines for the moment… We thought connecting asterisk with the pbx thru a T1 line…

thanks for any feedback on this.

You have the right idea, but Asterisk won’t configure itself. Don’t change anything on the PBX. Setup asterisk with a dual-T1 card and plug one into the PBX, the other into the line. Make it act like the PBX on the line, and act like the line to the PBX, so aside from being routed differently, the PBX thinks incoming calls are being handled the same. Also, if Asterisk screws up, you can always just replug the PBX straight into the T1 and business resumes as usual.

As for 120 extensions- macros are your friend! You DON’T want to write out 120 dialplan entries, so instead make a macro that does what the extension should do. Asterisk comes with a macro called stdexten which does this pretty well. So instead of 5 or 6 lines you do something like
exten => 1234,1,Macro(stdexten,voicemailbox,extensionchannel)
ie
exten => 1234,1,Macro(stdexten,1234@voicemailcontext,Zap/34)

If extension numbers are related to zap channels you can do something like
exten => _12XX,1,Macro(stdexten,${EXTEN},Zap/${EXTEN:2})

This will match extensions 1200 through 1299, first ring the zap channel of the last two digits (the XX), then send it to voicemail for the extension dialed. If I dialed 1234, both of the above extensions would do the same thing, only the bottom one would do the same thing for 1200-1299 too.