Solution for an asterisk based autodialer for a nonprofit?

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Hi,

I’m working with a nonprofit doing community organizing in San Antonio. We currently make frequent use of autodialers to get a hold of a lot of our constituents. Recently we found serious flaws in our old In Touch system which makes it basically useless to us. We can’t to spend the $1000 to get the software update right now. The system is based on an old Dialogic ISA D/41D board which I understand we won’t be able to reuse in an Asterisk box.

So I’m investigating if I can setup a completely open source based autodialer using asterisk or asterisk-derivates.

I found two asterisk based open-source autodialers: gnudialer and vicidal.

I have a little experience with Linux and found two books on Asterisk installations on Amazon. amazon.com/s/ref=br_ss_hs/00 … .y=0&Go=Go

My questions:

  1. How hard (I know that’s relative) is it to setup a Asterisk System with an open-source autodialer from scratch? Which of the two would you recommend?
  2. Which software combination can you recommend? How hard are the precompiled ones (Asterisk@Home, FreePBX, etc.) to expand by an autodialer?
  3. Which of the GUIs for Asterisk out there can you recommend?
  4. What is the cheapest and reliable hardware to get for this purpose? We wouldn’t use the system for anything but the autodialer right now and don’t need more than two lines. We still use standard phone lines. I was thinking about using two X100Ps.
  5. How hard and pricey is it to switch to VoIP for a project like this?
  6. Do you know of any consultants who do pro-bono work in this field for nonprofits?

I’m grateful for any answers you can give me. As a newbie to Asterisk I’m just drowning in information and terminology right now that I only partially understand.

Sebastian

2

OK
1.) Not hard to setup with a little linux under your belt.
centos 4.3 and asterisk takes about an hour on decent system with good bandwidth. now get the the vicidial, well that took me a few days off and on to get done.

2.) gnudialer and vicidial do not play well with Freepbx GUI

3.) Best webbased is FreePBX

4.) a good dell or any INTEL BASED system NO X100P’s they are just junk for testing…not for production use, buy the real deal and support the folks who make this possible (digium) digium.com/en/products/hardware/tdm400p.php the two hundreds buck or so you spend will be well worth it…

5.) Not hard if you understand that ViOP has the issue of no INET no PHONE… you can get many types of outbound packages depends on the area and what you need for outbound concurrent calls
Price is the cost of the system less than $1000.00 as the OS / software is free…
(I run a dialer for a NON-Profit twice a year and use VOIP lines from Connect.VoicePulse.com and we make over 2,000 calls and it cost me about $10.00 ~ $12.00 each run…)

6.) No Sorry (I do but I have no time at this time Katrina made more than I can handle)

vicidial is the better of two (IMHO)
astguiclient.sourceforge.net/vicidial.html
Pay them to set it up for you…

4

The OP has had 10 years to learn Linux and solve theiir problem!