What is an Asterisk Phone System?

Understanding Asterisk Support would make a little more sense if you knew what an Asterisk Phone System was. Asterisk Phone System is software used by businesses, most often call centers, to turn computers into easy to use communication servers. Asterisk Phone System creates a custom solution to meet your telephone needs and can be automatically installed in as little as 30 minutes.

Asterisk Phone System is often referred to as a “tool kit” because it provides the necessary equipment to create an Asterisk PBX system, an IVR system, or any kind of solution to solve your communication needs. An Asterisk Phone System includes many tools, such as different Asterisk VoIP protocols, the ability for single and multi-party call connecting, and the capability to record and monitor calls, to build the framework of your communication system. This compounds when you combine these with an asterisks predictive dialer.

Asterisk Support

Asterisk, which is created by Digium, offers a wide variety of options to support its customers who have the Asterisk Phone System including Commercial Support, Books, Mailing Lists, Real-Time Chat, Forums, Online Documentation, and Community Tutorials and Guides. You can choose any form to get the Asterisk Support you are looking for.

Asterisk Support – Commercial Support

The Asterisk Phone System is created by Digium, which offers a staff of experts for their customers to call upon for questions regarding how to install, configure, and issues with the operation of the Asterisk Phone System. In addition, if you are unsure of how to install your Digium hardware, assistance is offered with your purchase of hardware and your Asterisk Phone System software.

Asterisk Support – Books

There are several books related to the Asterisk Phone System you can purchase to find the Asterisk support you are seeking including “Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, 3^rd Edition,” “Building Telephony Systems with Asterisk,” “Switching to VoIP,” and “VoIP Telephony with Asterisk.”

Asterisk Support – Community Support

It is always great to have support from others who understand the technical process you are going through. Asterisk offers three different types of worldwide Community Asterisk support. A mailing list – for those interested in implementing or coding for Asterisk, live chat – where consumers can get ideas and help from other Asterisk Phone System users, and forums – which are great for new Asterisk Phone System users to ask basic questions, understand Asterisk features and have them answered by veteran Asterisk Phone System users.

Asterisk Support – Online Documentation

A free source for Asterisk Support is the online publication of the book written by O’Reilly entitled “Asterisk: The Future of Telephony 2^nd Edition,” which is a step-by-step instruction book on how to configure your Asterisk Phone System. The Asterisk dictionary, or glossary, located on the Asterisk website is another great free Asterisk Support tool for finding explanations of Asterisk-related words.

Asterisk Support – Community Tutorials and Guides

Some other great resources for Asterisk Support include “Asterisk: A Bare-Bones VoIP Example,” “Asterisk on Redhat Linux,” “Asterikast,” which are videos on how to use Asterisk Phone System, and “Asterisk Guru,” which are tutorials about Asterisk Phone System.

Conclusion

No matter what type of Asterisk support you’re looking for, it’s out there – books, mailing lists, live-chats, online documents, even just a definition of an Asterisk-related word – you’re only one click away from unlimited support for your Asterisk Phone System.

Asterisk Phone System is software used by businesses – small and large – call centers, and even government agencies to turn computers into easy to use communication servers. Asterisk Phone System creates a custom telephone solution to meet your needs by automatically installing the framework in as little as 30 minutes.

Asterisk Phone System is often referred to as a “tool kit” because it gives you the necessary equipment to create a PBX system, an IVR system, or any kind of solution to solve your communication needs. An Asterisk Phone System includes many tools to build the framework of your communication system including drivers for different VoIP protocols, the ability for single and multi-party call connecting, and the capability to record and monitor calls, to name a few.

Asterisk Phone System – Features

Asterisk Phone System offers a wide variety of features to assist in your communication needs, including both classic Asterisk PBX features and advanced features, due to the availability of high end, and often times high cost, large proprietary PBXs. Both features have the ability to operate with traditional telephone systems and Voice-over IP systems.

Some of the basic call features available include, but are not limited to, blind transfer, call forward on busy, call parking, the use of calling cards, dialing by name, the ability to send and receive faxes, remote call pickup, allow callers to listen to music while on hold, supervised transfers, VoIP gateways, visual indicators for voicemail, and Zapateller. Zapateller is an application that can block telemarketers from by producing a special information tone (SIT) to alert you when one is calling.

When it comes to the integration of the computer and the telephone, features there include the Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI), graphical call manager, and Asterisk predictive dialer, to name a few. Scalability features, which are the ability of a system to process work in a smooth manner, include voice-over IP, integration of physically separate installation, direct connection of Asterisk PBX, and a unified diaplan across multiple offices.

Speech features available on the Asterisk Phone System include Cepstral TTS, Lumenvox ASR, and Vestec ASR. The Asterisk Phone System can be run through three different main protocols each with various subgroups: VoIP protocols, traditional telephony protocols, and ISDN protocols.

Asterisk Phone System – Support

Asterisk Phone System is created by Digium, which offers a staff of experts for their customers to call upon for questions regarding installation, configuration, and systems operation issues. If you are unsure of how to install your Digium hardware, installation assistance is offered with your purchase of the hardware and your Asterisk software. A few books that can be of interest and offer Asterisk support on your Asterisk Phone system include Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition and VoIP Telephony with Asterisk.

Community support is available to all customer of Asterisk Phone System. Asterisk support offers a mailing list for their customers with an interest in using an Asterisk Phone System. Real-time chat is a way for Asterisks users worldwide to provide tips to each other they have discovered when using Asterisk Phone System. The forums are another way to connect and get Asterisk support from other users of the Asterisk Phone System.

What is an Asterisk Predictive Dialer?

To understand an Asterisk Predictive Dialer, it’s important to first understand the basics of what an Asterisk Phone System is. Asterisk Phone Systems are software used by businesses – small and large – call centers, and even government agencies to turn computers into easy to use communication servers. Asterisk PBX system creates custom telephone solutions to meet your needs, and installs in as little as 30 minutes.
Asterisk Phone System is often referred to as a “tool kit” because it gives you the necessary equipment to create a PBX system, an IVR system, or any kind of solution to solve your communication needs. An Asterisk Phone System includes many tools to build the framework of your communication system including drivers for different VoIP protocols, the ability for single and multi-party call connecting, and the capability to record and monitor calls, to name a few.

Asterisk Phone System – Features

It is also important to understand what some of the features of an Asterisk Phone System are, including Asterisk Predictive Dialer. Asterisk Phone System offers a wide variety of features to assist in your communication needs, including both classic Asterisk PBX features and advanced features, due to the availability of high end, and often times high cost, large proprietary PBXs. Both features have the ability to operate with traditional telephone systems and Voice-over IP systems.

Some of the basic asterisk features available include, blind transfer, call forward on busy, call parking, the use of calling cards, dialing by name, the ability to send and receive faxes, remote call pickup, allow callers to listen to music while on hold, supervised transfers, VoIP gateways, visual indicators for voicemail, and Zapateller. When it comes to the integration of the computer and the telephone, features there include the Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI), graphical call manager, and Asterisk predictive dialer, to name a few.

Asterisk Predictive Dialer

An Asterisk Predictive Dialer is most commonly used in call centers for sales calls, because it is an automatically dial groups of telephone numbers, and link them to specific employees who are assigned to a particular sales pitch. The Asterisk Predictive Dialer can also screen the calls to avoid answering machines and busy signals, to make sure that your employee is talking to a live person.

Advanced Asterisk Call Center (AACC) is an advanced feature of the Asterisk Phone System that uses the Asterisk Predictive Dialer. AACC is a call center software platform that helps to expand the ever-growing home-based call center employment opportunity. With AACC, you can set up a unique version of Asterisk Phone System in all your locations, including those who work from home, offering more opportunities. The AACC platform has many features including inbound calling, outbound calling with Asterisk Predictive Dialer, the use of Web media through Asterisk VoIP, and e-mail, to name a few.

Conclusion

Asterisk Predictive Dialer can be a great asset to your business, especially if you are in sales. It’s unique ability to dial, and monitor the calls for answering machines and busy signals, and make sure your employees are talking to a live person will keep your business running more efficiently.

The Asterisk PBX system allows for many of the features found in the most common landline office telephone implementations, and offers several features available only on a software implementation.

• Voice Mail
• Conference Calls
• Operator Menus
• Call Distribution
• Call Transfers
• Dial Pad Scripts

A fully implement Asterisk PBX system allows users to access the network via software phones (also known as soft-phones), traditional analog phones (special converters needed), and digital telephones. All the VOIP solutions offer great call clarity when adequate bandwidth is available. This makes the solution very flexible and allows companies to use existing hardware. When companies combine this with an asterisk predictive dialer, the possibilities are endless.

Because the system is open source, there are tons of options available when it comes time to getting asterisk support.

Click here to get an introduction to asterisk.

Asterisk is an open-source software solution serving as a telephone PRX (private branch exchange). Originally created in 1999, the software now falls under both the GPL GNU General Public License as free software, and a proprietary licensed version used for distribution by providers. The system allows, when combined with an asterisks predictive dialer for telephone communication between units stations on the network in addition to communication with telephones outside the local network. This is highly desirable in business application, where you see a lot of inter-office communication and transferring of calls.

Implementing an Asterisk-based PBX in your office can be a difficult task. Many third-party providers have come along providing turn-key services to install and maintain Asterisk on-site setup, as well as off-site hosted versions. The providers can help launch a system in a relatively short amount of time.

Asterisk phone systems generally run on a linux server, although ports have been made to run on other operating systems such as MAC and Windows. Linux is generally the most supported and up-to-date versions and is the most common implementation.

Asterisk PBX systems are highly desirable because the software is open-source, reliable, and readily supported. Getting Asterisks installed and asterisk support at your office can save you time and money as opposed to a traditional landline setup. A proper install will help you benefit from all asterisk features.