Help: Newbie need suggestion to implement IVRS

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Hi,

I’ve downloaded Asterisk@Home, but it seems quite complicated to me and a number of things for me to catch up.

Our goal is to replace an existing IVRS in our company, which currently has 4 tel lines and 1 fax line. The telephone lines are in trunking mode (i.e. to the public, we only have 1 phone no while internally we have a few lines operating).

Requirements:
The mechanism is quite simple: public dials in and being asked to choose language; subsequent menus are just different levels delivering appropriate information.

If public can’t get what they want, system can divert the line to the corresponding officer (different options have different telephone extensions)

In addition, we have fax-on-demand, public be able to input his/her fax no. and then the system will fax out the requested document.

Success/failure events are logged for troubleshooting and usage statistics.

In the future, we would want to access to a database in another server for importing/exporting data.

Question:
Is Asterisk the right choice? Or Asterisk@Home the right choice?

What hardware I need to build the new box? How many and which card models (from digium or any popular band) I should rely on?

Thanks a lot!

2

Asterisk is certainly capable of doing what you want, but you can’t expect a vanilla install of either Asterisk or A@H/Trixbox to do what you want.

i would suggest that you go with A@H for now, without buying any hardware, and play with it for a few weeks. if you’re still totally confused then it’s probably time to find a consultant locally who can help you (although, if you can get remote access to the Asterisk server setup, you can use just about anybody, myself included).

the wiki at voip-info.org/ is going to be your bible during this phase, along with the A@H handbook. with regards to hardware spec, you only need a P2/P3 with 512 of RAM to start with. production specs will depend on how many calls you envisage taking in x hours, and what else you want the box to do.