I guess this column title should be changed to Small Business VOIP - since there is no longer Response Point.
A few years ago I got interested in being able to offer VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) telephone systems to my small business IT customers. I heard about Asterisk, an open source linux offering, and thought 'this is cool - a powerful phone system and it is free'. I spent a few weeks, after hours, gathering the hardware and software components and trying to get an Asterisk/Trixbox system up and running. As always, in the open source (free) world, getting technical support is difficult.