[HELP] pre-noob question on Asterisk possibilities

Hi all!

I’m pretty new to VoIP and have do not have any experience in setting up or using Asterisk.

I’m hoping to get some comments from experienced users on if what I have planned is doable in general :wink:

Here’s my situation/plan:

I’m working for a company with roaming employees that each need to be available via two different numbers corresponding to two different office-locations.
They have 10 numbers per location still ‘hosted’ by standard phone-company which I would like to port to a VoIP-provider.
The main-office has a pretty good internet connection (2MBit) so I would like to install an Asterisk at that location handling all the calls and use VoIP-phones capable of handling more than one line (preferably Sipura SPA-841).

1st question:
VoIP-Provider says mapping more than one number to one account is not a problem. In the documentation I read I only found Asterisk listening on which digits are pressed and deciding what to do or where to route the call. Can Asterisk be used with multiple incoming numbers?
If so – with multiple accounts? Or will I need to use two machines one for each account?

2nd question:
The two locations (and external) are connected via vpn so I would like to have connection from phone to Asterisk stay within the company-network – will there be any problems connecting to Asterisk through vpn?

3rd question:
One thing the employees do not want to miss is the option of dialing from pc (for example out of Outlook). Is there something similar to tapi-drivers? If yes – could one choose which line to use for dialing? (info: Clients are all Windows-machines)

Like I said – no experience on my side – these are general questions before even starting this project since I could be getting something really basic completely wrong :wink:

Any help/comments/recommendations are very highly appreciated!

THX

eis

1st answer: You need only one machine. Yes you can have multiple incoming lines - not sure for the world - look for ’ predictive dialing’ or something like this ( ${DNID} - is the variable)

2nd answer: There is no problem to use Asterisk in vpn.

3rd answer: Do you mean softphones?? If you mean some software phone , try Idefisk (IAX protocol | download | manual ) or some SIP softphone like X-lite ,…

wow - that was fast! :smiley:

concerning 3 - no, what I really mean is at this time they have ISDN-Phones with headses and are able to right-click-and-dial from desktop. Is there a way to rebuild this option - like triggering the VoIP-Phone. Using softphones in general could be an alternative for office-workplace but what we need is to be able to unplug phone - go to other location - plug in again. Other location could as well be ohter pc or completely without pc (for instance) … but I guess I will think about the soft-phone-option since these would be much cheaper :wink:

concerning 1 - so if we had to accounts, to each mapped 10 differnt numbers Asterisk could logon to both and recognize which line is being called? and then even go through digits-pressed options?

thx

eis