Hi people, this is my first appearence at this blog, by way of a small introduction  my name is Juan Pablo Bustos and I’m writing from Mendoza – Argentina, I’m a Systems Analyst and also I have my ECT Certification.

I’ve been talking with Rafael about publishing this method, and he suggested to share it in the Elastix Blog, so that’s why I’ve have published it, so we can polish it and see a way to implement it on a larger scale.

The objective of this implementation is to use Elastix’s dialer to call a list of customers to deliver a message and to be able to still use the Call Center with “real” agents. I have also added a little PHP script that logs the customer’s answer (number dialed) after the call is completed.

To get this to work, we need to create:

- Some “virtual agents” that are created in the same way as the “real” agents in the  Call Center’s GUI.

- A Custom Context to log them in with the command AgentCallbackLogin (sadly deprecated in Asterisk 1.6 , but able to be worked around).

- Another Custom Context to log them (for debugging purposes, but useful sometimes).

- A Custom Context to redirect the calls to a final custom context that will handle the calls. (more…)

It’s sometimes interesting to be able to install a small server Elastix on a device that is not expensive.

It is also well known that Asterisk does not need huge CPU power to function properly, with minimal requirements for RAM, and the hard disk size (few gigabytes is enough).

I personally had the chance to get their hands on a superb offer from the incumbent. No less than 101 € for this little Netbook. With my current server running on the same basis, I told myself: “Why not put this on Elastix netbook?!”

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In this post we are going to share some useful video tutorials uploaded to Youtube by  Scott Wittenberg.  These and other videos can be accessed in the Elastix Youtube Channel.

In this article you can watch the following videos:

• How to setup a basic Extension in Elastix
• How to setup a basic outgoing trunk in Elastix
• How to setup Follow Me in Elastix
• How to Setup A Basic DID (Telephone Number) Using Elastix
• How to setup a basic IVR (Automated Attendant) in Elastix

How to setup a basic Extension in Elastix

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There have been quite a few un-answered questions about getting Elastix working on embedded x86 hardware, such as PCEngines Alix hardware. In this tutorial we want to install Elastix on the Alix.6b2, however other Alix hardware will work fine. The aim is to have a fully working Elastix system booting on an embedded x86 system without a monitor ever being plugged into the hardware. You will need one attached to your desktop however.

I was incredibly surprised at how easy it was to install Elastix on an embedded system. Very little tweaking was required when I found out where to go and what to do. Now you too can install Elastix on your Alix hardware with ease!

Be warned, there’s a few screenshots after the break (Around 20)!

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Extras

Tunnelling to the Elastix Web interface

One of the other great things you can do with SSH tunnelling is tunnelling to the Elastix web interface. When you are using putty to login to your machine use this tunnelling rule.

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Introduction

Sometimes the best tools we can use are the simple ones. I have been an asterisk tech for over 4 years now and this is one of the tools I couldn’t have been able to live without. On most IP networks customers are splitting their voice and data networks. The phones are on a completely different network to the computers and the Elastix box will be the only device which connects to both networks. SSH tunnelling allows you to connect to the phones when you are on the data network. Another situation where tunnelling is great is when you have remote access to your Elastix machine but you only have access to port 22. SSH tunnelling allows you to connect to the Elastix machine then tunnel to any device on the Elastix network. SSH tunnelling is done through putty. Putty is a program that allows you to load the linux shell through your windows machine. You can grab putty from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/.

Configuration

In this example I will connect to an Elastix box then I will tunnel to an IP phone on the network. Open putty and put in the ip address of the Elastix machine you want to connect to.

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We all know that g711 (alaw / ulaw) is meant to sound the best. It’s uncompressed and equivalent quality to ISDN, which most businesses are used to with their traditional PABX System.

However, it comes at a price, 64kbps + overheads means around 111kbps when you factor in everything else over an ADSL PPPoA / PPPoE connection.

Now that’s a LOT when you think about it, considering on a standard ADSL2+ line you’re going to max out at around 5-7 SIP lines, especially if it’s a shared connection. This is where a compressed codec such as (My personal favorite) iLBC, or g729, can be incredibly cost effective, as you can load up around 15-20 on the same sort of bandwidth. When you’re a small business, that means with the right kind of QoS, you can share your ADSL Broadband connection and still have 5-10 concurrent phone calls, all happily living together.

So do away with expensive BRI interfaces and monthly charges, and go SIP!

We’re going to look at a few things very briefly:

1) MOS – What is it and why do I care?

2) Which codec is right for me?

3) g729 – Installation

4) iLBC – Installation

5) Trunk and Extension setup

6) Testing the codecs

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Introduction
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Previous to the release of Skype for Asterisk, many users have implemented a range of Third Party products and tools that required usually a separate machine as a Skype Gateway. It was a messy way of implementing it as the Skype API was more of a high level API and it was the only way of implementing it. Whilst commercially these gateways were used, they were not an ideal commercial solution with increased points of failure and complexity.

Recently Skype had a change of mindset and started working with a few interested parties to implement a more integrated approach  with a lower level API, which means a cleaner integration. Asterisk was one of these parties and  have worked together with Skype to produce a product call Skype for Asterisk.

It does have a cost, but to be fair, it is quite a reasonable one for the functionality, and there is licenced proprietary code which needs to be paid for. Now there have been a few people saying that $US66 is expensive to pay per channel, many of them who run an Asterisk based systems at home. Most businesses who recognise the value and want this functionality, will dismiss the cost immediately. With 405 million registered Skype users world wide, and based on the fact that 30% of these users are business users, leaves you with 121 million potential people who can call your business directly for free (especially if your product is an international product), whether it is for support, ordering a product or your own remote offices that already have Skype installed on their desktop, it is a very small cost to pay.

Now before you get started. There is one very important concept that is important and something that you may not have come across before. The Skype account must be a Skype Business Account http://www.skype.com/business/products/business-control-panel/ . Now don’t panic as you see all the monetary values on the Skype page. The business control panel was not purely setup for Skype for Asterisk. This business control panel was originally setup to allow businesses to control and monetarily monitor their employees Skype usage. This mechanism however is the only way that it can be implemented. It is not a big deal, just a matter of registering, and once completed, create a username under that account that will be used for your Skype for Asterisk.

Now before you start, I recommend have a brief read through the document on the Digium website as it does contain some additional information that doesn’t required repeating here. https://www.digium.com/en/supportcenter/documentation/viewdocs/SFA

Now the other reason to go to that website is to confirm the latest versions of software and their links. Likewise you may need to replace the links in this tutorial with ones more suited to your setup (e.g. you might need the x64 versions). The tutorial below is based on the Elastix 1.6 on a 32bit platform (previous to this it worked fine on a 1.5 – possibly with yum updates which brought the Asterisk version up to the required level). (more…)

In this blog you would find information related to events, technical documentation, and everything related to Elastix. People who write in this blog are well known members of our community that are willing to share their knowledge with the rest of us. Nevertheless, anyone who wishes to submit an article can do it.

If you have a tip or an experience you want to share with the community about Elastix in this blog, please submit your article to rbonifaz[at]elastix.org. Palosanto Solutions will analyze the articles and define which ones will be published. All articles must be released with the GNU/FDL license.

To begin, we have the following two articles:

• The first article is about a cheap, fast and efficient way to implement QoS with Elastix. This article is written by Josiah Spackman (chilling_silence) from New Zeland.
• The second article is about interoffice trunking with IAX. Thanks to Bob Fryer, learn how to connect two offices together using Elastix.

SIP combined with Elastix is nothing short of amazing.

Cost savings, flexibility, functionality, and I’ll say it again: Cost savings!

When deploying Elastix to use SIP over ADSL (for example), many find their existing Broadband connection does not quite provide satisfactory call quality, usually due to sharing the connection with other traffic.

We will follow this post up later with another on Diagnosing connectivity / quality issues.

NOTE: This is not the only way to do QoS, but after having struggled with the likes of pfsense, the budget / useless junk that many routers build in, and a host of other software / hardware solutions, I found Tomato did it the easiest, the best, and the most reliably! It’s a breeze to setup, and you’ll be kicking yourself for not having set something like this up earlier. (more…)