Asterisk PBX Part 1
Initial Investigation.
Over the last few weeks I have been working on a Unified Communications Strategy for my company. It has been a very interesting process as I have not worked with voice services since 2002. The company is setup on an NEC PBX that is about 13 years old. While the PBX itself is not a problem, meaning it works and people are not complaining about the service provided to the desktop, the problem is about feature sets that will allow us to move the company into the 21st century.
In 1999 and again in 2002 I deployed an Asterisk PBX as a forklift replacement for the PBX and KEY systems respectively. The unified communications project for my company was not about a forklift upgrade so much as an augmentation to provide the additional services we so desperately needed without adversely affecting the day to day operations of the respective business units.
This augmentation to the communications infrastructure needs to provide:
The Asterisk PBX project seemed once again to be the candidate to fulfill the needs of the organization without a huge deployment expense. I did realize from previous deployments that there were inherent limitations to the platform and that certain pieces should be purchased to augment the software. Many of the issues related to poor Asterisk PBX implementations revolved around two key areas; handling the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) connections and having a large number of SIP clients connected to the PBX.
It was first necessary to begin by testing the system and demonstrating capabilities. It was clearly time to establish real business cases around the new technologies and if we were successful in demonstrating the cost savings and or income capabilities we would then be able to move forward on developing a strategy around a production deployment of the system.
Cary H. 
