Those of you who use Asterisk@Home, I’m sure that by now you’re familiar with having a GUI at your fingertips. There are those of us however, who have not had the luxury of a GUI and all the good ones were pay only… which sucked. HOWEVER, now, AMP’s creator, Coalescent Systems, has released FreePBX, which I think is mainly just a title change. So if you didn’t know about this free one, here it is folks!
FreePBX is webbased, thus you will need a web server installed, and as always, Apache is reccomended. The FreePBX wiki lists these as it’s highlights.
- Add or change extension and voicemail accounts in seconds
- Native support of SIP, IAX, and ZAP clients (other endpoints are supported through custom extensions)
- Supports all Asterisk supported trunk technologies
- Reduce long distance costs with LCR
- Route incoming calls based on time-of-day
- Create interactive Digital Receptionist (IVR) menus
- Design sophisticated call groups
- Manage callers with Queues
- Upload custom on-hold music (MOH)
- Search company directory, based on first or last name
- Detect and receive incoming faxes
- Share administrative duties
- Backup and Restore your system
- Save audio recordings of calls
- View call detail reporting with asterisk-stat
- View extension and trunk status with Flash Operator Panel
- View conversation recordings with Asterisk Recording Interface (ARI)
- Spanish translation provided by Fernando M. Villares Terán
http://wiki.freepbx.org/tiki-index.php
I feel that I need to start from scratch on my Asterisk Box, so I will be installing Knoppix on there and then once Asterisk is installed, I will be trying out FreePBX, which seems very very promising. So check it out guys.