Small Business Setup

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Hi there,

Just wanted to ask about a couple of things.

I am currently looking into the viability of using Asterisk@Home to replace our current PBX.

Our current setup is:
3 Lines all using the same telephone number
2 Lines each with its own telephone number

An 0845 number which can be configured to point at different numbers (currently setup to ring each of the 3 telephone numbers in 15 second intervals - after the third number after 15 seconds the call will goto an answer machine which then emails us the recording) - (Can’t see this being an issue with Asterisk myself).

8 Extensions (9 with the remote worker) - which is better a softphone or IP hardware phone?

We have a remote worker connecting through VPN - will a softphone work ok through a VPN connection?

Can you plug in a CD player to provide on-hold music?

The use of an IVR is quite a bonus as our current analogue PBX dosn’t have this facility!

Is something quite easily setup using Asterisk@Home? It may sound dumb to some but am quite new to the VOIP world and just wanted a firendly pointer.

Thanks,
James

2

Asterisk@Home is a good way to learn Asterisk, I would not use it in a business.

Depends on the budget and your users. Go with the hard phones if you can afford it.

Call quality will depend on the bandwidth and the quality of the connections between both points. Things like TOS can help you out sometimes but even TOS will do no good if it is encapsulated in a VPN packet.

It can be done. It would be easier to convert the CD to MP3s and play the music from the hard drive. If that is not an option then you can use the CDrom drive on the computer to play the music.

We were all new to VOIP at one point in time :wink:

3

Asterisk@Home is a good way to learn Asterisk, I would not use it in a business.[/quote]

I would say Asterisk@Home for a smallish SMB is fine and a great way to get started. It provides all of the base PBX functionality needed enshrined in an easy to use/understand GUI.