Why and How to implement asterisk in your office

we all know or at least heard about asterisk by now. an open source PBX, which provide small and big enterprises the opportunity to cut costs and improve their old fashioned telephony systems.

the problem with old fashioned pbx systems made by avaya/alcatel/etc. is that they are way over priced, For years they had the ability to set the price for their systems license for almost every component in the system , and most of the times also force us to use their proprietary phones.

PBX based on Asterisk  is first of all free, all you need to take care of is the hardware, ranging from a free vmware appliance on your office server for your small business to a dedicated heavy duty server for your call centre.

I recently implemented an asterisk based pbx for a 30 people office, inter connect it with 2 other locations with SIP trunks, and I can tell you… what a joy!

easy to configure, extensions were bulk loaded, PRI took 2 minutes to activate with the operator, 30 SNOM300 phones were configured easy and the office telco is up and running, free features such as: conference rooms,softphone video conversations, fax to email, and many more, no more licenses! upgrades are free, the only cost is per extension is a physical phone roughly $100 and if that person want a headset it’s even free using a softphone on the computer.

the pbx software is used there was elastix, and it’s a very very fun tool to use.
how much it costs?
software/licenses: FREE
Hardware: $2500 (for small office can be summed up by $1000 with PRI support, we chose to have it ready for expansion)
Phone:$100
softphone: FREE
all together (30 extensions): $5500

having this one implemented successfully, we decided to switch our main office from the old digital/analog pbx to the same system.
about 80 people with expectation to grow, the system cost us only double than what we should have paid to increase the capacity on our old pbx.

Elastix PBX Config

to sum it up, if you are afraid of switching your office telecommunications to an open source product, fear not! that system and i am only a small example is being implemented every day in avery complex places and scenarios.
the costs cut is unbelievable.

to sum it up GO asterisk GO!

FLASH Operator Panel