We’ve been bouncing a couple of ideas around the office about the implementation of a VOIP system, many of our team have followed the Asterisk project and thought this might be the first place to start… but am having a bit of trouble finding information on what we want to do…
We currently have an LG Aria 34e PBX system with 4 analogue lines coming into the system and 12 extensions. I believe the unit is based on a Nortel chipset.
At this point, until we’ve tested Asterisk further - I would be hesitant in replacing the existing system completely, so we’ve been wondering if any of our ideas are possible, and if so - can someone point us in the right direction to delve deeper 
One idea is to"add" an Asterisk server to our PBX, the PBX would continue to take the incoming lines and handle the existing extensions.
The Asterisk box would be used to handle incoming and outgoing VOIP calls (internal and external), voicemail and telephone call recording (i’ll get to that in a second).
For example, we have engineers out in the field and would like to give them VOIP phones… and when they plug in to the network at a clients site, vpn back into our network and become part of our phone network, so extension (say) 201 becomes engineer 1, 202 engineer 2, etc.
With regards to the call recording - we develop software/websites, and as an idea (we’ve run this by clients and they’re ok with it) we would like to be able to record conversations we have with clients about projects so we have an audible history of discussions to ensure that we (client and supplier) remember all the things discussed about a project and can ensure we deliver the project properly… using the audible recordings to go back and check things that were discussed…
So I guess my question is… is there a way to link Asterisk into our existing PBX as an additional source of VOIP based lines (in + out) and also extensions, or any of these other ideas…??
Or is there a better way of doing this?? or should I just scrap the existing PBX??
Thank you