I am utterly frustrated!
It’s clear that asterisk is powerful. Yet do the creators of asterisk make it rough to configure things just to get people to sign up for support, and pay to take classes?
I am so tired of googling to find out answers to things, some apply and most others are for outdated versions which dont work.
Here are the 2 most ridiculous and time wasting things I have seen so far.
There is a GUI, and its disabled by default! How nuts is that. First I had to look up how to enable it, parse through the google crap that didn’t work, and peice together bits from one place to another to get it working, only then to find out it says access denied.
Seriously, what a waste of time! Just enable it it be default!!! Every router on the planet comes out of the box with a default user/ password. It would be much better to enable it by default and have users open a config file to disable it. That is more user friendly. When you learning something new, its best to default to things on than things off.
Second, you have many config files. Are we back in the dos days? Who wants to take the time to open them, find the area your looking for, change it and save it. You can do everything far faster with a GUI! No one, no matter how fast they can type can beat the speed of setting something up in a GUI, so lets get modern here.
Asterisk does not include a GUI by default, there used to be one from us but it is no longer an active project and is not maintained. It is not guaranteed to work. FreePBX is a GUI for Asterisk and is a third party project. A GUI by itself is a HUGE project which requires a lot of time, as does Asterisk itself. Personally I consider Asterisk a toolkit and not an end product by itself. You make the end product (or others) by writing dialplan logic, configuration, etc or using a GUI. As well my focus is on making a stable solution that works for a lot of people and is documented as best as it can be. Are we the best in that area? No, there’s always documentation to be written and improved. One of the avenues we’re going down to help is an actual guide to deploying and using Asterisk from a company a perspective, Super Awesome Company[1].
Asterisk is not an end product, Asterisk is a framework for building multi-protocol, real-time communications applications and solutions. Asterisk is to real time voice and video applications.
You can use Asterisk to build communications applications, things like business phone systems (also known as PBXs), call distributors, VoIP gateways and conference bridges. Asterisk includes both low and high-level components that significantly simplify the process of building these complex applications.
You can use third party products as FreePBX or Elastix if you are looking for a GUI impose limitations, You can also use Asterisk realtime architecture and PHP+MYSQL to build a nice GUI.
Also Asterisk is open source, which means you can get under the hood, see how it works and make any changes or enhancements you like. Asterisk is flexible and lets you define the solution that truly fits your requirements