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Tom Keating
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Asterisk

Asterisk Linux Based IP-PBX

Asterisk With Office Communications Server 2007

May 27, 2008

Asterisk integration with Office Communications Server 2007 is a popular topic in the unified communications community. You wouldn't think integrating an open source Linux-based solution (Asterisk) with Microsoft's proprietary OCS 2007 UC platform would be popular, but it is. In fact, I have my ear to both the Microsoft OCS 2007 community and the Asterisk community and the integration of these two worlds is something I hear all the time. Some within the Asterisk community poo-poo the thought of integrating with Microsoft OCS 2007.

snom m3 DECT SIP Phone Coming to North America

May 19, 2008


In late 2007, snom announced the snom m3 DECT wireless SIP phone. snom sent me a review unit a few months ago to review and alas it's been sitting on my large pile of VoIP products to check out. The m3 is a cool looking phone and very gadgety, so usually I would have torn into the box and played with it the same day I got it, but if I set aside other projects every time I got a cool gadget, I'd never get anything done.

Well, I finally had time to install and test the snom m3 and hope to write a review soon. For now, I'd like to share today's news that the snom m3 wireless VoIP Phone now being generally available in North America.


Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Rumors

May 15, 2008

I've heard from various sources about Office Communications Server 2007 R2 coming soon. I'm a member of the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 MVP team, so I'm privy to information that I cannot divulge at this moment due to NDA requirements. In fact, I hadn't planned on blogging this at all had I not come across a few posts online talking about OCS 2007 R2. Other sources outside the Microsoft MVP community were also asking me if I knew anything about R2.

There are several rumors milling about what features OCS 2007 R2 would contain, including this link on Network World.

Druid 1.2.0-3 Launches

May 13, 2008

Today, Druid 1.2.0-3, an open source Asterisk-based solution was launched. (Check out my full review of the Asterisk-based Druid platform for some background.) Here's a screenshot of their web-based front-end that makes it easy to manage their version of Asterisk:



Vikram Rangnekar from Druid shot me off an email saying they have some great new features in Druid. Figured I'd share some important excerpts of his email that explain the news:

In the two months since its been out, We have had a little over a thousand downloads. I'm more than satisfied with how the community is growing we have around 400 people on the forums a little over half of them are quite active, We have a lot of people posting bugs, suggestions and many people actually using Druid OSE in their organizations.

We have a few people porting the Druid RPM's over to Gentoo and SuSE.
We are still finalizing the SOAP API but we have added a ton of new cool stuff.








Shoretel Rumors

May 1, 2008

SHORETEL UPDATE: 4/24/09

Could it be - with ShoreTel continuing to provide PBX solutions - that the rumors I reported about them nearly a year ago were false? Is it now clear that Rich's sources that sparked this article were wrong?

Shoretel seems to be going strong. In fact, while this article was written a long time ago, but thanks to its high ranking on search engines, it still sparks the occasional new comment from avid Shoretel fans.

You can read the comments below for other people's thoughts. There are many avid fans of the Shoretel platform that have come to Shoretel's defense.





Rev B of Astfin's BRI (ISDN) Asterisk Appliance Arrives

April 29, 2008


Rev B  of Astfin's BRI (ISDN) Appliance has just arrived. The BR4 appliance (or BRI Appliance) is an open hardware BRI Asterisk Appliance running Astfin. I've written about this Asterisk-based appliance before. The Astfin.org blog author writes how he used the popular USB jtag (ICEbear) to connect to the new BRI Appliance rev B board.

Podcast Interview with Digium CEO Danny Windham

April 17, 2008

Just want to point you to Rich Tehrani's interview with Digium CEO Danny Windham. He covers everything from open source to Web 2.0 & mashups. Digium is the 'heart and soul' of the Asterisk movement, so when their CEO speaks, I listen.

Truth be told, I haven't listened to the podcast myself yet, so I wonder if Rich mentioned to Danny my humorous Hulk post from yesterday, which is about Digium. Well, my attempt at humor.

Hulk Smash Asterisk 1.6!

April 16, 2008

Nerd Vittles had been lamenting the fact that the "Asterisk 1.6 development seemed to be on a collision course with the dinosaurs because of developer insistence on deprecating and removing commands from the application programming interface (API) in the name of technology enhancement."

Nerd Vittles then explains why this is a bad idea.

The problem this poses is that applications and dialplans written for previous versions of Asterisk no longer function even though the code is barely a year old. In the corporate and government sectors, this would mean major, costly (annual) rewrites of code just to keep a functioning phone system. And, as we noted, these organizations buy phone systems to last a decade so such a development strategy would all but rule out use of Asterisk in the Fortune 500, medical, and government sectors.




PIKA T1/E1 and analog boards now compatible with FreeSWITCH

April 15, 2008

PIKA T1/E1 and analog boards are now compatible with FreeSWITCH.

Some good news for PIKA this morning worth reading...

PIKA Technologies Inc., a developer of media-processing hardware and software, today announced that its entire family of analog and digital host media processing (HMP) boards is now compatible with FreeSWITCH, an open-source telephony platform typically used by large telecommunications companies deploying soft switches and other voice applications.

This is the latest partnership that PIKA has announced as part of its mission to support open-source-telephony application developers, having previously announced compatibility with the Asterisk platform.

"PIKA is thrilled to be partners with the FreeSWITCH community. This will mean more options for application development companies across the globe who are building FreeSWITCH-based solutions," said Terry Atwood, vice president of sales, marketing and customer care at PIKA. "Now, FreeSWITCH users will have access to PIKA’s robust media-processing software and hardware, and as a result, be able to stabilize as well as add incremental value to their applications."
FreeSWITCH is designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat-driven products scaling from a soft phone up to a soft switch. It can be used as a simple switching engine, a PBX, a media gateway or a media server to host IVR applications using simple scripts or XML to control the call flow.

"I was really excited to get PIKA hardware working in FreeSWITCH," said Anthony Minessale, Lead Developer and author of FreeSWITCH.










trixbox 2.0 launches

April 15, 2008

trixbox version 2.0 launched today. Current trixbox customers will automatically receive their upgrade to 2.0 between today (Tax Day) April 15th and Wednesday, April 16th, and best of all, it's 100% FREE. trixbox Pro Version 2.0 is a big release for trixbox, in fact Fonality boldly claims it as "actually our biggest ever, adding over 120 enhancements to your phone system."

Here are some highlighted new features:

All Editions 
FONcall™
FONcall™ is a plug-in for the Firefox web browser which turns any phone number on any web site into a link. Just click the link and your phone will automatically dial -- it's that simple. 





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