Thorben has announced a new IPSwitchBoard for Asterisk

Download FREE from: http://ipswitchboard.thorben.dk

IPSwitchBoard is an Operators Panel for the Asterisk PBX. IPSwitchBoard is a FREE Windows.NET application which gives you:

- Unattended/attended transfers.
- Park calls and retrieve/forward them again.
- Organize all your SIP, IAX, CAPI and Zap extensions (automatically retrieved from Asterisk).
- Hotel/Call-Shop Billing module
- Monitor all extensions, queues, agents and Parked Calls.
- Dynamically log extensions in and out of queues.
- Integration with CRM software on the web.
- Browse Call Records and make Charts.
- Record calls and transfer wav files to the PC automatically.
- Set Do Not Disturb on Extensions and give a reason.
- Speed Dialing. Speed Dial Numbers can be shared from the server.

The clash between open source and proprietary telephony solutions has arrived

link: http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/06/28/27OPconnection_1.html
CTO Connection, By Chad Dickerson
June 28, 2005

I am running out of options for areas in my IT operation that
legitimately shouldn't be open source. Operating system? Linux works
like a champ. Web server? If you're not running Apache at this point,
what are you doing? Database layer? MySQL scales fine for most
Web-based apps, and basic master/slave software clustering for it is
free, which can save roughly six figures over a commercial solution if
you're running more than a couple of database servers. App server?
JBoss (Profile, Products, Articles) if you want Java, or you could
just use PHP running on Apache, among many other choices. OK, I
haven't spent any money on software yet, and hardware is cheap. I'm
surveying my office right now, looking for something that I couldn't
enable with open source software, and my eyes fix on that ugly
corporate phone that hooks into the old PBX. I feel helpless before it
-- I look at it and the words "lock in" might as well be blaring from
the speakerphone. There's nothing I can do about it. Open source can't
help me with my crusty old PBX. Except that it can. And for me, that
suggests that open source can -- and will -- go anywhere and
everywhere.

Asterisk, a highly sophisticated open source PBX software package that
runs on commodity hardware running Linux or pretty much any other
operating system with GCC (GNU Compiler Collection), is the first open
source project in quite a while to really make me stop and pause. The
InfoWorld Test Center gave Asterisk high marks earlier this year and
O'Reilly's Nat Torkington recently noted on the O'Reilly Radar blog
that his company's IS department planned to replace its production PBX
with Asterisk. I shouldn't be surprised because our reviewer gave
Asterisk such strong praise -- and on low-end desktop machines, no
less. Instead of fearing such a critical application of open source, I
wish that I ran the phone system here at InfoWorld so I could start
planning to roll it out myself. Assuming reasonable planning, I fully
expect the O'Reilly implementation of Asterisk to be as successful as
our own tests were.

For the doubters who might say, "I would never use open source for
something as critical as my phone system," I offer some historical
perspective. Six years ago, switching to Linux was considered daring
enough to garner me a mention on Slashdot and an interview in PC
World. Now Linux is so routine no one really cares anymore. I chose
Linux then because it worked flawlessly, just as it does now in my
current environment. Looking farther up the stack, remember when IT
used to say, "We can run our Web servers on Linux, but when it comes
to my database, I'm sticking with the big guns?" A quick glance at
MySQL AB's (Profile, Products, Articles) current customer list (France
Telecom, Google (Profile, Products, Articles), Suzuki, to name a few)
suggests that the once-revered database layer is no longer sacred. No
doubt we will all look back five years from now and feel the same way
about open source telephony solutions as solutions such as Asterisk
slide down to the comfortable end of the fear curve -- just as Apache,
Linux, and MySQL have done before.

For IT managers, the question becomes, "Who is going to fix this stuff
when it breaks?" Probably the same smart people who run your
Linux/Apache Web servers now, only they will handle hardware and
software upgrades on their own instead of relying on expensive
engagements with old-school telephony vendors. Think this is crazy
talk? Give me a call in 2010 -- and let's see what type of PBX is
handling the connection.

10 more reasons your company needs VOIP

10 reasons why today's business needs VoIP

link: http://www.itbusiness.ca/index.asp?theaction=61&sid=59323

6/22/2005 9:59:00 AM - Voice over IP is more than just saving money. Here are the best reasons for transitioning over to VoIP

by Ed Lavin

Moving voice communications to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) isn't just about saving money on long distance. Smart companies will make the transition because of a whole host of other reasons that include improved business communication, customer service, and increased employee productivity and
mobility.

The benefits of VoIP can reach all corners of a business, in areas that both CFOs and IT managers may not have ever considered. All these benefits demonstrate clear competitive advantage in and among themselves, so put them together and you have a very powerful business case to move your communications infrastructure to a VoIP model.

Here are the top 10 reasons:

1. One Network for Voice and Data: In the past, organizations have had to have separate network infrastructures for voice, data and internal communications. With the advent of VoIP, all of the communications traffic can be placed on a single infrastructure, which simplifies maintenance and cuts costs.

2. Reduce Trunk Lines: Renting truck lines from carriers isn't small change for most organizations that rely on voice for both internal communications and customer interaction. Trunk line rental is a significant part of monthly overhead cost, so why not reduce this outlay wherever and whenever possible?

3. Long Distance Savings: While saving on long distance is no longer the primary driver for adopting VoIP, it can be a prime factor for organizations that have multiple offices requiring frequent voice communication, so not having to pay for that communication can reduce a large amount from an organization's operational budget.

4. Seamless Teleworker Connectivity: VoIP makes it easy to integrate teleworkers into the business telephone system through their own broadband connections. In addition, your customers will be able to reach your teleworkers through your corporate switchboard, regardless of where the worker is physically located.

5. No Major Upgrades: Since VoIP is "future proof," you won't have to worry about another large capital equipment upgrade a few years down the road when your existing telecommunications equipment stops being supported by the supplier.

6. Instant Communication and Collaboration: VoIP improves productivity and the ability to collaborate remotely by creating direct links between teleworkers and office-based workers with the click of a mouse - a "workplace without borders."

7. Respond More Quickly to Customers: Companies can improve customer communication by providing them with VoIP telephones that allow them to contact your sales and service departments directly, toll-free.

8. Cut Move, Addition and Change Costs: Every time your company moves, adds, or changes a conventional telephone connection, it costs money. With VoIP, your network configuration is software programmable and its voice signals are carried over your business LAN so you can administer the changes yourself.

9. Reduce Deployment Costs: VoIP reduces the total cost of deploying a business telephone system. With a conventional system, you have to deploy Cat 3 cable for voice to each desktop, as well as Cat 5 cable for data. With VoIP, you need only deploy the Cat 5, thus saving time, money and materials.

10. Take Control: Ultimately, you gain more control over your telecommunications infrastructure, relying less on large incumbent telcos for your communications needs. The benefits of a VoIP communications model are numerous and go beyond simple costs savings; it also leads to improved productivity and customer relationships which in turn translate into a better bottom line and a healthier, more competitive business.

Ed Lavin is a pioneer in the telecommunications industry, He began his career at the L. M. Erickson Company of Sweden in 1973. Today, he is the CEO of Delphi Solutions Corp., a company he originally founded at CTG.

New Diax

Hi all,

A new version of DIAX is available for download: 0.9.15a.
For the moment you can find it only at the following location:

http://www.cosmica.ro/dante

and

http://www.geocities.com/tdanro

Whats new in this version comparing with 0.9.10f (the latest official
version):

- GSM/PSTN Gateway functionality;
- starts with XP Styles even the first time;
- can connect to the asterisk server to a different port than 4569;
- you can place a call on hold with Asterisk based MOH;
- can use '-' as a separator in the phone number in phonebook;
- iaxclient library update (March 17).

Solved bugs:

- wrong callerid displayed when direct dialing a number;
- cannot use server IP address in Windows 98;
- send URL function does not work;
- Send the default CallerID instead of the configured one;
- crash when going to the registration form in French language;
- corrupted main form position if closing the app when minimized;
- exiting application during a call does not close that call first;
- cannot call using diax://number/alias when diax is already open;
- ringin.mid file not extracted at first run from the exe file;
- wrong default CallerID info (diax version as name and date as
number).

The help file is updated to.

As usual, please send me your feedback.

For any questions or features requests do not hesitate to send me a
mail.

Best regards,

Dan

itbusiness.ca: VoIP is ready for prime time

6/15/2005 10:30:05 AM - But are Canadian customers finally going to start investing in telecommunications technology?
by Roberta Fox

As leading telecommunications analysts and consultants, one of the questions we are asked frequently is..."What and when are customers spending their IT and telecom investments on"?

It is always an interesting question to answer in that, compared to traditional research houses, we are directly
involved with helping large distributed enterprises develop their strategies and architectures for their next-generation technology infrastructures. We also help them also determine which vendors they should be working with, providing products and support services for their data, voice and call centre technologies.

During the past three years, most of our enterprise clients' technology investments were primarily focused on software upgrades and maintenance services with little or no "net new" technology investments. There was some "technology investigation" investments in VoIP feasibility, but generally our enterprise clients maintained the status quo.

Many of the organizations also reduced their IT and telecom headcount through a combination of early retirement, layoffs or through attrition. The existing staff have primarily focused on maintaining the day-to-day operations with little or no time available allocated for projects that involved emerging technologies such as VoIP. We have been engaged to help clients develop preliminary feasibility plans of migrating to VoIP technologies, but this was from a very high level, and with a view of three to five years out prior to investments.

We have seen a recent shift from several of our client organizations where they are now more actively investigating the possible strategies, architectures, migration plans and skills required to effectively deploy and support next-generation VoIP technologies.

One of the interesting considerations is whether they should directly invest their capital in VoIP technologies, or alternatively, should they deploy as a managed services from a service provider.

We believe some of the reasons for this alternative approach as as follows:

Knowledge and skills required to design, deploy - Converged IT, data and voice skills required to manage VoIP solutions;

Concerns about ownership, accountability and lack of experience with VoIP technologies within the Information Technology department

Where does it fit? We have taken part in numerous discussions related to the concerns by senior leaders about the political challenges of finding a home and owner for VoIP.

Does it fit within data, IT, voice departments?

Who should own the next generation VoIP solutions, let alone, deploy and manage it?

We believe that VoIP technology and supporting solutions are now ready for prime time.

VoIP technology can be stable and reliable if properly designed and deployed. But conversely, from our own hands-on experience in testing multiple VoIP solutions, the technology skills and ownership issues are the next area that has to be answered in order for customers to start re-investing in telecommunications technology.

Those manufacturers and service providers that help organizations deal with the human factors of VoIP and other emerging technologies will gain the confidence and mindshare of enterprise customers in the future.

Roberta J. Fox is a senior partner at Fox Group and managing director at Grayfox Institute. You can contact Roberta Fox at Roberta.Fox@foxgroup.ca.

Is the telephone industry ready for open source?

Is the telephone industry ready for open source?
By Ben Charny
URL: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-5739539.html

Five years after the dot-com bust, the spotlight is again shining on a
brash tech whiz kid who thinks his software will radically transform
an old-world industry.

But Mark Spencer's company, Digium, has something that eluded many a
Silicon Valley wannabee during the bubble: real revenues. The company
pulls in about $10 million a year, and its open-source software has
garnered interest from such business stalwarts as AT&T.

Spencer's company makes Asterisk, an open-source application, for the
Linux operating system, that's at the heart of many installations of
sophisticated corporate phone equipment. The upshot: Gear that
typically costs hundreds of thousands of dollars is now available for
the price of a laptop.

Digium generates revenues from licensing its open-source software to
commercial interests. But it also faces new competition, a topic
Spencer addressed during a recent CNET News.com interview, a talk in
which he also discussed the impact of open source on
telecommunications.

>> In the past, you've described Asterisk this way: "The genie is out of the bottle and nothing will change that." What do you mean?

Spencer: Telecom has been traditionally a very proprietary kind of
industry. There's a total dearth of any kind of open-source voice
communications.

>> You've said your mission is "extreme capitalism." Explain.

Spencer: It's like a big game of Monopoly, but you can't let anybody
win. Capitalism, to me, is a system of competition in which the end
product becomes better and (less expensive) because of competitive
forces pushing on it. Open source forces you to have to be more
competitive. As you add competitive advantage, that advantage is
adopted more rapidly; you can't sit back on your development. It
forces you to constantly be innovative because people can use your new
thing immediately.

>> More argument for a proprietary software--to monopolize your developments?

Spencer: But open source speeds up competitive cycles. You have to
work very hard. With proprietary systems, sure, there's only one
company that can implement any new development. But that's not
scalable. With open source, resellers can make those changes on the
fly and add those features.

>> Is the telephone industry ready for open source?

Spencer: There will always be room for proprietary software. But there
are certain characteristics that predispose a market to open source.
One is the size of the market; telecom is enormous. Secondly, there's
got to be an audience with a high degree of technical skills. Telecom
people are much more technical than most others.

>> What's the ultimate place for Linux in telecommunications?

Spencer: Look at what happened to the personal computer. In the 1980s,
there was only so much you could do on a PC. Spreadsheets, word
processing--it was fairly limited....Now supercomputers are running on
AMD 64 architecture and Linux. Most of the proprietary architectures
got pushed farther out to the fringe of technologies. That's what
we'll see with Asterisk.

>> There don't seem to be a lot of developers writing PBX applications. So how can

Asterisk grow new features very quickly?

Spencer: The technical nature of the audience makes the difference. In
1998, I created an instant-message client that's very popular, maybe 2
million users. But just a few dozen developers are contributing their
work back into the open-source community. At 200,000 installations,
Asterisk has 300 contributing developers.

>> You've authored your own Internet phone protocol, IAX, to compete with the very popular Session Initiation Protocol. Why?

Spencer: When I came out with IAX, the SIP standard was around but was
not very well deployed or anything like that. It wasn't necessarily
developed as a competitor to SIP. But SIP was designed to do more than
make phone calls, and it's suffered because of its complexity. There's
more than 2,000 pages of SIP specs. It's unimaginable how it's ended
up in this mess. There are people that want something simpler.

>> But is anybody using IAX? And how so?

Spencer: Global Crossing uses IAX for its last-mile connection, and
SIP for inside the network.

>> Two standards in one network. Isn't that proof of a standards schism?

Spencer: Asterisk's goal is to try and support a lot of different
protocols. Different ones are needed to solve different problems. IAX
makes a real good model for the last mile.

>> There are already companies saying they are making an Asterisk that's better than the original. So, in effect, doesn't your commitment to open source threaten Digium's very existence?

Spencer: What you're getting at is a serious issue. When we talk about
open source bringing vendor independence and empowering customers to
be in control of their own industry, it does mean we have our work cut
out for us. The industry will be much larger than we are, and there
will probably be companies selling more significant products. We can't
sit back. If we didn't play our cards right, then the Asterisk wave
could go on and we'd not be part of it as much as we'd like to.

>> How have you managed to generate revenues with open-source software?

Spencer: The debate about profits and open source versus proprietary
is a moot one. You already can build a profitable company using open
source. We've shown that. Now that it's there, you have to adapt your
business model to the reality of the situation. Nowadays with the
Internet, the idea of selling things on a per-license basis, as
software's typically sold, just isn't compatible any more.

>> Any changes to Asterisk in the works?

Spencer: We have a business edition, which should be shipping this
month. It's the same software put through more formalized testing,
sold with a more traditional software license model and is for people
not familiar or comfortable with open source.

>> Are you part of the new versions of Asterisk for proprietary operating systems, such as Microsoft and Apple Computer?

Spencer: We don't do that. But part of the reason we have a good
relationship with our community is we play by open-source rules. So,
when we develop new software, we do make it available. I don't
anticipate that the versions for proprietary operating systems
represent a threat. We want to be able to adapt to support commercial
and open-source markets.

-- | The Ontario Asterisk & Voice-over-IP Enthusiasts Group | Join by visiting http://uc.org/asterisk, or by sending email to | asterisk-subscribe@uc.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: asterisk-unsubscribe@uc.org For additional commands, e-mail: asterisk-help@uc.org

Bell Canada unveils Global VoIP solution for business customers

Bell Canada unveils Global VoIP solution for business customers

Canadian multinationals can now reduce telecommunications costs and
improve productivity.

MONTREAL, June 9 /CNW Telbec/ - Bell Canada, today announced an
enhancement to its Global Suite of IP network services with the launch of
Global Voice over Internet Protocol. With Global VoIP, Bell Canada can now
manage customers' voice and data traffic over a single, integrated IP network
anywhere in the world.
"The launch of Global VoIP is another example showing that our IP
strategy is gaining more and more traction in the marketplace. Canadian-based
enterprises operating on an international scale can now take full advantage of
an IP world, no matter where their businesses are located," said
Isabelle Courville, President Bell Canada Enterprise Group. "Global VoIP is
the latest application in Bell Canada's Global IP suite and is an important
component of our strategy as a world leading IP-based communications company.
By leading the way to IP, Bell Canada is providing Canadian companies with a
competitive business advantage."
As a fully managed service offering, Global VoIP is backed by Bell
Canada's acknowledged customer care organization providing both a single point
of contact and accountability for Bell's customers. The Global VoIP service
will not only simplify a company's network but will streamline costs
associated with voice and data. By interconnecting geographically dispersed
customer locations over a "virtual private IP network", Bell Canada can
provide unlimited, international, intra-company voice services at a flat rate
versus a traditional international long distance service. Companies
subscribing to the G VoIP service will also benefit from reduced costs for
off-net international voice communications.
Bell Canada has partnered with BT Infonet, a leading provider of global
communications services, to deliver Global IP services. The suite of services,
which already includes IP VPN now includes Global VoIP which is delivered by
BT Infonet's wholly owned The World Network(R).
"There is widespread recognition that IP-based networks are the best way
to save money and increase productivity," said John Hoffman, Executive Vice
President of Global Sales, BT Infonet. "With this alliance, BT Infonet will
help Bell Canada provide its multinational business customers with value-
added IP-based solutions wherever they do business."
The initial rollout of Bell Canada's G VoIP solution will be trialled by
a number of leading Canadian multinational corporations including Apotex,
Canada's largest pharmaceutical company.

About Bell Canada

Bell Canada, Canada's national leader in communications, provides
connectivity to residential and business customers through wired and wireless
voice and data communications, local and long distance phone services, high
speed and wireless Internet access, IP-broadband services, e-business
solutions and satellite television services. Bell Canada is wholly owned by
BCE Inc. For more information please visit www.bell.ca .

For further information: Bell Canada Media Relations, Mohammed Nakhooda,
(416) 581-3311, 1-888-482-0809, mohammed.nakhooda@bell.ca

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