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Visual Dialplan v1.4 is released – Now available for Linux and Windows platforms

May 29, 2008

The latest Visual Dialplan v1.4 for Asterisk� is now available for Windows and Linux operating systems, includes support for MySql database and much more.

If you'd like to download APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional or Standard edition to give it a try yourself, please use these links.
Free APSTel Visual Dialplan Download from RatemyDialplan.com

This is the first official release of Linux version and we want to take this opportunity to thank you all for the tremendous contribution and support you have provided during the beta testing process - Thank you! The complimentary licenses will be on its way shortly!

Linux users will benefit with many new features like:

* One button deployment with integrated SSH client
* Custom component that facilitates reuse of existing dialplan code
* Dialplan include functionality
* Context or Macro include functionality
* Personalize Visual Dialplan behavior using preferences
* MySql support
* and more...

Although Windows users already have many of these features we have some nice surprises for them too, like:

* Integrated support for MySql database
* Improved work area component dragging
* Easier upgrade process
* Fixed issues in AgentLogin and SetCallerPresComponent components
* and more...

We strongly suggest and invite all Visual Dialplan v1.x users to take advantage of free upgrade to Visual Dialplan v1.4 and to download the latest Visual Dialplan.

If you'd like to download APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional or Standard edition to give it a try yourself, please use these links.

Free APSTel Visual Dialplan Download from RatemyDialplan.com

Written by Voip Phreak · Filed Under News, Products 

APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional Review – Part 4

May 29, 2008

We've used this program quite a bit over the past few weeks off and on when we had time for proper testing. Please see our previous articles for more information on this program, and while you're at it, don't forget to upload your personal Asterisk Dialplan diagrams to our awesome sister site Rate My Dialplan.com, where you can rate and share your Asterisk Dialplans.

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Here's a screenshot of the program, and links to our previous three articles.

Overall, we found the program loads fast on our computers, and we had no issues with the licensing or usage in both the trial, and paid versions of the program. The program was easy to use for both us, and we feel that novices to Asterisk Dialplan creation could also grasp by viewing the sample Asterisk Dialplans, and reading the extensive documentation. Visual Dialplan Professional could use a few features as we found out, but not much more.

We Like!:

  • Fast
  • Easy To Use
  • Documentation
  • Great Samples
  • Price
 Issues:

  • A Few Screen Redraw Issues noticed
  • No Save as Image Capability
  • No Ability to view Overall Dialplan
  • No "Site Manager"
  • Missing Asterisk 1.6 Support
Overall: 4/5 Rating for APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional

As you can see, most of our issues are with features lacking, but who can blame APSTel, the core features are there, and all work wonderfully.

Even for users that are New to Asterisk will be able to understand this product and how it works. From creating simple home dial plans to extensive corporate call centers, APSTel Visual Dialplaner will help speed up the process for administrators.

The only drawback is no easy way to export the whole diagram to show upper management, I've been told this feature is forthcoming in the software, so I'm personally really looking forward to that. See our previous articles for more information on this program, and while you're at it, don't forget to upload your personal Asterisk Dialplan diagrams to our awesome sister site Rate My Dialplan.com, where you can rate and share your Asterisk Dialplans. Thanks for reading!

If you'd like to download APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional or Standard edition to give it a try yourself, please use these links.

Free APSTel Visual Dialplan Download from RatemyDialplan.com

Written by Voip Phreak · Filed Under News, Products, Programs, Testing 

Deploying Asterisk Dialplans with APSTel Visual Dialplan – Part III

May 29, 2008

Earlier, we spoke about the basic features of APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional, and some Advanced Features in part ii of our series. This article will deal with deploying your dialplan to a remote server. Remember, once you've created some dialplans to post them on our other site, Rate My Dialplan.com.

If you'd like to download APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional or Standard edition to give it a try yourself, please use these links.
Free APSTel Visual Dialplan Download from RatemyDialplan.com

One very interesting feature of APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional is the ability to remotely deploy your Asterisk Dialplan to your Asterisk Server.

This makes it very easy to test your Asterisk Dialplans out quickly and efficiently. We didn't run into any issues using this portion of the software, except for permissions on our Asterisk Box. We disallow root ssh logins, and because we have Asterisk running as its own user we are not able to securely modify /etc/asterisk and its files. So, we instead just deploy to a symbolic link in our home directory to a file in the Asterisk directory with the proper permissions.

Make sure you validate your Asterisk Dialplan before you deploy it to your remote Asterisk PBX Server. This will make the whole process go a lot smoother as we found out the hard way.

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After your Asterisk Dialplan is validated, you'll want to first select the Deploy to server button, if you configured it in the first step it should show up here. If you didn't, like we did in our first article, you will have to create one now.

This is fairly straight forward, when you first click the new button on the deployment server selection window, you will then be given a window with the options you can configure. See below for screenshots. Here you see the initial window where you can select the servers you can deploy to.

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When you click New and go on to the next window, you will be given the ability to configure your server's settings. You can also deploy locally, if you have a directory mapped to your Asterisk directory or other fancy things setup for this to work. We chose to use the SSH method as we felt it would be the most commonly used scenario when deploying Asterisk Dialplans using APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional.

The screen allows you to Name your connection, and set its options up. We went with the following for our configuration as seen in the screenshot below.

Name: Local PBX
Server: <your server>
Port: 22
Username: <your user>
Password: <your password>
File Name: <your path> e.g. /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf
Confirm Deploy: <Yes>
Create Backup: <Yes>
Reload: <No - Have to set Permissions First if Yes>

You can also edit the reload command for Asterisk if required. As noted above, for the reload command to work, you'll either have to ssh in as the user you are running asterisk as (and give that user a shell). Or you will have to ssh in as root and have that enabled on your server. There are probably other ways around this, but we have not implemented it yet. Maybe in another article :).

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After setting your deployment options for APSTel Visual Dialplan, you'll next be presented with a box to confirm the remote deployment of your Asterisk Dialplan. Just click yes, and it will do its thing.

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Seconds later a confirmation window appears. The Asterisk Dialplan is successfully deployed to the server.

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This process was very easy to complete and makes management of Asterisk Dialplans easier. You can verify the Deployed Asterisk Dialplan by editing the file, like this:

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Stay tuned for the fourth in our series of articles on APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional for Asterisk Dialplan creation. In our final article, we'll actually review the product itself. Don't forget to upload all your Asterisk Dialplan diagrams to our hot sister site Rate My Dialplan.com.

If you'd like to download APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional or Standard edition to give it a try yourself, please use these links.

Free APSTel Visual Dialplan Download from RatemyDialplan.com

Written by Voip Phreak · Filed Under News, Products, Testing 

Zaptel 1.2.26 and 1.4.11 Released

May 29, 2008

The Asterisk.org development team has announced the release of Zaptel
versions 1.2.26 and 1.4.11. These releases contain many bug fixes as
well as performance enhancements.

A couple of the more major changes include: kernel level MTP2 support
for SS7, as well as numerous other bug fixes to the Digium and Xorcom
drivers. For further details and a more complete list see the
respective Changelog files.

Both releases are available as a tarball as well as a patch against the
previous release. They are available for download from downloads.digium.com.

Thank you for your support!

Written by Voip Phreak · Filed Under Asterisk 1.4, News, Zaptel 

Advanced Features of APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional – Part II

May 28, 2008

In our Previous Article, , We spoke about the basics of the program. Here we'll briefly touch on some of the advanced features that we were able to edit using the APSTel Visual Dialplan professional program. Remember, you can use these diagrams on our sister site, Rate My Dialplan.com.

If you'd like to download APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional or Standard edition to give it a try yourself, please use these links.
Free APSTel Visual Dialplan Download from RatemyDialplan.com

While creating the visual Asterisk Dialplan, you can include multiple contexts that you have setup elsewhere, and you can also modify time conditions for said included contexts. We found this interface easy to use, and easy to get to. This may be a little daunting for beginners, but it's by no means impossible to figure out.

Here you see the include context windows, and the time conditions menu available for the included contexts, pretty nifty.

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Back in the main interface of the program, after we've saved our Asterisk Dialplan we can see the "TestContext" context in the contexts screen of Visual Dialplan Professional. This is where your contexts will be displayed for you to see the flow of them, and to easily click on any of them to edit them. We found this intuitive and easy to understand.

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Clicking down to the Global Variables window, this is where you would set any specific variables you need for your Asterisk Dialplan. Below we've created a basic sample to show what it looks like, remembering to delete it because it's obviously not valid and will break the Asterisk Dialplan validation when we go to upload it. This was easy to follow and made sense to us in terms of user interaction and usage.

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Following the Global Variables window is the Channel Variables window. This is where some of the default channel values are set, and can be added on to. These don't need to be edited unless you know what you're doing. We left this alone for our sample context and Dialplan.

Here is a sample screenshot of the Channel Variables window in APSTel Visual Dialplan.

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The last and final window available is the Macros window. This is where you would setup any Macros for use in your Asterisk Dialplans. Creating the Macros' can be a little daunting, and we'd recommend it to people with previous experience with Asterisk Dialplan Creation.

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Here's a Screenshot of the Macro Window, and Visual Context Creation for said Macro. The options can be a little confusing, so take your time or ask an experienced Asterisk Technician about this one.

Editing your Asterisk Dialplan Properties can also be configured from the menu if you desire. Simple click the Properties option and you can enable basic features or disable them. The defaults are fine, we didn't have to touch this, and like it that way.

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Stay tuned for the next article in the series where we're going to discuss deploying your Asterisk Dialplan to your remote Asterisk Server using APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional. Don't forget to upload your Asterisk Dialplan to Rate My Dialplan.com .

If you'd like to download APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional or Standard edition to give it a try yourself, please use these links.

Free APSTel Visual Dialplan Download from RatemyDialplan.com

Written by Voip Phreak · Filed Under News, Products, Testing 

Creating Visual Asterisk Dialplans with APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional – Part I

May 27, 2008

Today we're going to talk about an interesting program from APSTel Visual Dialplan, which enables you to create Dialplans for your Asterisk PBX in a visual method. This enables both new Asterisk users, and seasoned professionals to quickly and efficiently create Asterisk Dialplans.

If you'd like to download APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional or Standard edition to give it a try yourself, please use these links.
Free APSTel Visual Dialplan Download from RatemyDialplan.com

This article is the first in a series of four, describing the inner workings of the product, how to use it, some advanced features, deploying dialplans and finally a review on the product. We encourage everyone to use this program, and upload their dialplans to our sister site, Rate My Asterisk Dialplan.

Now onto the article. When you first open up APSTel Visual Dialplan you are presented with the register application window. If you don't have a registration code, you can go ahead and try the trial version out. If you have a registration key, you may enter it now.

Upon entering the registration key, you'll be shown the Register Application screen, which lets you setup the basic properties of the Asterisk Server you will be connecting with to deploy your Asterisk Dialplans. You can set this up for now, or you can also do it later. We've entered some default values here to show you what it looks like, but we chose to set it up following our initial Dialplan creation, which will be explained later.

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From here we'll go ahead with the normal operation of the program. Once you open up APSTel Visual Dialplan you'll be asked to create a new Asterisk Dialplan, Open an Existing Asterisk Dialplan, or open and use one of the APSTel Sample Asterisk Dialplan Examples to play around with. For the purposes of this article, we will create a new Asterisk Dialplan from scratch.

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Once you have clicked the New Asterisk Dialplan wizard, you will be presented with a dialogue asking if you'd like to create your Dialplan for Asterisk 1.2 or Asterisk 1.4. Support for the latest beta, Asterisk 1.6 is not supported yet, but will be in the future.

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After selecting the type of Asterisk Dialplan you wish to create, you'll be given the choice to name your initial context. You can name this anything you want just like you would when creating a new context in your already existing Asterisk extensions.conf

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We have created our Asterisk context with the name "TestContext" and a little description so we know what it is when looking at the APSTel Visual Dialplan Context Interface. After you have clicked the ok button to continue, you'll be given the Visual Dialplan Context window for the context you have just created. This is where you can create your Asterisk Dialplan in a visual manner, with interactive configuration abilities.

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Most of your attention will need to be focused here when you are within the visual Dialplan creation window. This is where you will select the Asterisk Dialplan applications that you want to use. Separated in a tabbed list of functionality, hovering over them will give you the text description of each icon. We found this very intuitive and easy to use for both new and experienced Asterisk Users. The contextual help is handy.

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Using commands from the menu above, we created a very simple Asterisk Dialplan example. This dialplan simply starts, Answer()'s the Line, Playback()'s a sound file, Wait()'s for a second, then Hangup()'s the line. We simply selected the dialplan application we wanted to use, and then drew a box on the Asterisk Dialplan creation window and it would instantly appear. Linking the boxes was as simple as dragging from one box's dot to the other box's dot. It is worthwhile to mention that you must be careful of the spacing on your visual Asterisk Dialplan elements as if they are too close together the lines will go off in funky wrapped directions.

To modify the elements of the Asterisk Dialplan we created, we simply right clicked on one that required configuration and then edited it from the contextual menu. For example, here is the Time Interval menu.

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Once we were satisfied with our test Asterisk Dialplan, we went up to the menu and chose the validate button, this can be found both in the title menu, and in the icons at the top of the program. Nice and easy to find, and convenient to have for newer asterisk users that need to verify their configuration.

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We are now finished creating our basic Asterisk Dialplan and run-through of the basic features of APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional. Keep reading for some advanced topics and more information.

That tops off the first article in our four part series about APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional, Stay tuned for the next article in the series about some of the advanced features this program offers.

If you'd like to download APSTel Visual Dialplan Professional or Standard edition to give it a try yourself, please use these links.

Free APSTel Visual Dialplan Download from RatemyDialplan.com

Written by Voip Phreak · Filed Under News, Programs 

Walmeric – C2T Press Release

May 27, 2008

Hello List,

Here's some news that may be of interest. Many readers already know Mexuar
and Corraleta, we thought it would be a good idea to share news of Walmeric
Spain who recently deployed a C2T solution developed using Corraleta:

WALMERIC CHOOSES MEXUAR'S CORRALETA FOR C2T VOICE APPLICATION

Walmeric Soluciones in Madrid have launched a new C2T (click to talk) hosted
service for companies wishing to add voice to their e-commerce web sites and
shopping portals. They chose Mexuar's Corraleta technology
(http://www.mexuar.com) for reliability, quality and ease of use.

Corraleta is a platform independent application built around the Asterisk
open source telephony engine and running on the Java Virtual Machine. Using
a standard web browser and broadband connection, users dial the softphone
and make a 'live' call in under 10 seconds. The call is initiated and
carried through VoIP and can break out to standard PBX servers.

The system is highly secure: there is no software to install, thereby
avoiding viruses; no ports are opened which could lead to firewall issues;
and no routing takes place via unknown PCs or servers. Correlata uses IAX
protocol, resulting in a tiny footprint of only 125kb for click-to-talk
applications, and with easy NAT router and firewall transition.

Walmeric supply their C2T solution within 10 minutes of the client paying
for the service online. The client is supplied a softphone in the form of a
customised 'Call Us' button and the dialplan is routed through Wamerics call
service. The client can then deploy the 'Call Us' button on their shopping
site or web portal.

Charles Woods, Mexuar's global sales and marketing director, says:
"Corraleta uses Java technology and, by developing a Softphone application,
it's a powerful tool in bridging the internet and telecommunications.
Walmerics solution enables the customer to easily add a C2T solution on the
web site taking minutes to deploy rather than days. In today's competitive
market it's an extremely effective solution"

He adds: "Our applications support web users interacting directly with
customer service agents and are proven to boost sales and overall service -
especially in higher-value sales transactions. Corraleta delivers
Click-To-Talk 2.0 for businesses, enabling them to quickly deploy platform
neutral applications that bring significant cost savings."

Antonio Moraques, Walmeric's Managing Director of communications, comments:
"Mexuar's Corraleta technology is flexible and from the tests we made has
the best audio quality. Our solution enables the customer to buy 'On Demand'
and they are not tied into lengthy contracts. This is ideal for businesses
that need to budget. Our customers can use C2T within minutes. There is also
no need to download large software programs. It's quick and easy to use,
simply click to buy and click to talk - all in 10minutes!'

Mexuar Communications are currently developing their next generation click
to talk and VoIP technology solutions. To be the first to know about these
why not subscribe to our blog area http://mexuarapps.blogspot.com or contact
Charles Woods, Sales & Marketing Dir.
on +44 (0)161 866 0028 charles@mexuar.com

Regards,
Charles.

Charles Woods
Sales & Marketing Dir.
Mexuar Communications Ltd
Tel +44 (0)161 866 0028
Mobile +44 (0)7894 338260
www.mexuar.com

Written by Voip Phreak · Filed Under News, Products 

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