Web application questions

Hey all

I am new to Asterix and indeed to PBX platforms and VOIP.

We are experienced website developers building a Php/MySql (Unix hosted) website for a client that is a member based subscriber/supplier booking system. No problem here.

The client has come to me with an idea that he wants me to research in addition in terms of it’s level of complexity.

So - if anyone can give me a basic idea of the complexity of this it would be great:

Our MySql database will store (opt-in suppliers) user phone numbers.

Basically, upon a certain activity within our website we need to populate a series of concurrent outgoing phone messages (no more than 6 calls at one time) that asks each user a question and offers them a series of options.

The user will then reply via their number keypad upon which our system will process these answers and continue on it’s next action depending on the answers that it receives.

I’m really sorry I can’t be more descriptive but I have signed an NDA which makes it difficult to tell you good people any more.

So - can we do this with Asterisk?
Can it be hosted on the same server?
Will we need other applications with Asterisk to make it work?

Thank you anyone who can break this down to something that we can begin to plan/scope out.

Darren

You can do this with Asterisk. But you will need a voip gateway or a voice card (like zaptel) in order to connect asterisk to the PSTN.

It can be hosted on the same server, but as always, it is a good advice to isolate tasks on different servers, for security reasons.

Telefony Applications are quite hairy in terms of timing and latency.

While this is generally not a problem (i.e.: Any Old Machine will do) this might turn out to be a problem in your scenario. I had the situation where I had a PBX on a WebApplication Server. Once a day it would get a major load in terms of processing requirements, and network usage. Those times phone calls were not fun.

So while you could do it all on one machine and say “To Hell with Security” I would still recomend against it for other reasons, one among them performance.