Well after a month of testing Asterisk and a SIP trunk for our business we are quickly realizing that we are investing far too much time configuring, patching, etc. I am beginning to realize why Asterisk is not more popular.
I have spent many, many hours and evenings learning, reading the docs, and testing. I even spent a day sniffing packets to gain a better understanding of how SIP calls are setup, information that is just not clear on the web or youtube. Heck, even the intro to SIP link on this site is broken! And, as you all know, part of the problem is wading past the “experts” that think they know how this all works…
Anyhow, we have just hit a wall with this Cisco video and blf issue, and it is probably going to kill this project. We have hired help through Elance, but the people are just not reliable or available.
So before we pull the plug and buy call manager, I am making one last appeal: Can anyone recommend a good linux/Asterisk guy that can help us with these patches and setup more features like RTC, Alarm integration, ENUM. Etc?
Thank you for listening to my frustration!
If you are unable to self support, using open source will mean that you have to organise the paid support yourself. If you go for a commercially supported product, like call manager, or (although I have no experience of it) Digium’s Switchvox, some level of support will be included in the price. I suspect, though that you would be sufficiently far off the beaten track with a commercially supported product that you would still need to hire consultants. Open source comes back into play if you are so far off the beaten track that you need to have bespoke development done, or you need a detailed understanding of the internal workings.
Coming to that, there is a Biz and Jobs forum on this board, which is the one you should be using if you are trying to hire a consultant… I think you will tend to find that the people on these forums are either consultants themselves, or don’t need consultants, so I’m not sure that you will get much unbiased advice on the choice of consultants.
Dont know if you have called cisco yet… or where you are in the world.
But you could start here:
voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+consultants
Or you could elaborate on “this Cisco video and blf issue”, that could result in some more to the point information. As you state “information that is just not clear on the web or youtune” so is this issue… 
Good luck.