Asterisk PBX Part 4
Initial Testing Turns Production.
The Elastix installation of Asterisk PBX went without a hitch. The DAHDI module saw the T1E1 card from Digium in the machine and everything started playing nicely together. Now it was time to get into the trenches to figure out what capabilities we wanted to demonstrate. To move from a 13-year old closed system to a modern day, open source, software PBX left me with a lot of avenues to pursue to save the company money and provide more features.
- Fax Services.
- Today faxes are received and sent from common-area fax machines.
- No faxes can be converted to PDF and e-mailed to a recipient.
- ACD Queues.
- The current system supports minimal UCD Queue operations
- We must call on an outside company to set it up and maintain those UCDs.
- No reporting capabilities on the existing UCD use.
- Conferencing.
- The company currently purchases simple voice and video conferencing services.
- Within the new system cost would be limited to 800 number usage fees.
- Interactive Voice Response.
- We must call on an outside company to maintain this feature.
- We do not have knowledge of the extent of the scripting language.
- We have immediate needs for potentially heavy call volume order status checking.
The outline was complete. The savings on fax services alone could total into the tens of thousands of dollars per month and conferencing would add thousands more back to the pot. IVR and ACD would only be system enhancements for now as I could not see where initial savings would come from.
Fax service configuration was nearly native out of the box. Elastix utilized the app_fax module and all of the previous issues I found using Asterisk pre-distribution and fax were gone. We were now able to implement a full fax service for the department and/or various business units. I was extremely excited about how these new features could save so much and provide more than imagined before.
While I was sitting at my boss’ desk, the call came. One of the business units needed a low-volume IVR with an associated UCD/ACD queue. It only seemed logical that the next step would be to place our new PBX into a production run and implement two of the four initial strategies.
The IVR was not that complex, but it did involve retrieving information from our IBM AS/400 and providing order status information to our potential caller. In Asterisk Part 5 we will discuss what we did and how we achieved the first major test of this Asterisk implementation.
Cary H. 
