Asterisk 1.2 - a presentation of the brand new release version

Asterisk 1.0 was released at Astricon 2004. The asterisk.org development team has released the first beta versions of Asterisk 1.2 for testing. This talk describes what developers have been doing for a year, what changes has been done to Asterisk and what are the benefits of all these new functions?

Kevin P. Fleming, Digium and Olle E. Johansson, Edvina.net

Kevin Fleming is a Senior Software Engineer at Digium, Inc., the primary developer of Asterisk. His responsibilities include managing Digium's interaction with the Asterisk development community and providing direction for Asterisk's future.
Olle E. Johansson is one of the Asterisk developers that works with SIP support, documentation and user interface issues. Olle is also co-founder of Astricon and teaches Asterisk in the Asterisk training classes.

Catching the Echo

VoIP – does not perfectly match POTS quality - yet! The introduction 15 years ago of the “all digital” mobile transmission network reportedly spelled the end for echo and other related noise issues in phone calls. However, since that time the echo canceller business has grown dramatically. VoIP also suffers from echo and noise problems which are troublesome at best and – often times irritating to the point of ending the call and redialing.
Today’s VoIP networks are susceptible to two kinds of echo – Acoustic and Hybrid with acoustic echo raising itself as the more troublesome and problematic type of echo for VoIP users. Don Dingwall will identify sources of acoustic and hybrid echo and why they exist in VoIP networks. He’ll cover some of the solutions that are available and why some approaches work better than others.

Don Dingwall, Ditech Communications Corporation

Don has been with Ditech for the past 8 years as Sales Director in the South Central US. He works with the major wireline and wireless carriers in that region and globally with MCI and SBC. Prior to Ditech, Don was Cisco Account Manager for MCI during MCI’s impressive growth to one of the top providers of IP solutions. Currently, Ditech is offering solutions for echo and other noise related issues for both the traditional TDM markets and for the VoIP providers.

Setting up a stable Asterisk for business use

Asterisk stability relies on many factors: Your hardware, your operating system and general maintenance of the system. James Lyons work with testing for the Asterisk Business Edition and shares his experiences in how to set up Asterisk for stability and mission critical use.

James Lyons, Digium

A system for auto-provisioning VOIP Telephones for Asterisk

We built an experimental system for "auto-provisioning" VIOP telephones for Asterisk. In our office environment, new employees are constantly arriving, as existing employees are moving on to other assignments. When this is coupled with folks moving offices as their assignments change, moving telephones to keep up with employees is often on the critical path.

Using Asterisk in conjunction with a modified ftp boot server, and our corporate LDAP directory, we have built an auto-provisioning system for Polycom VOIP telephones.

In this talk I will discuss the auto provisioning system, and explain why we made the implementation choices we did.

Stephen Uhler, Sun Microsystems

Stephen Uhler is the Principal Investigator of the Enterprise PDA project. Before Enterprise PDA, Uhler was the PI for the Brazil project, which included an experimental web application development environment ideal for web-enabling devices, aggregating content from other web applications, and building personal web portals that filter and modify aggregated content.

Prior to that, Uhler was the creator of the reverse-proxy, a key component of the sun.net product, the architect and designer of the supplier.net secure supply chain integration system, and a member of the SunLabs TCL project, where he pioneered the TCL embedded web server technology.

Voice-enabling Legacy Applications with Web Services and Asterisk

Not long ago, the only means of exposing your legacy business logic to voice customers was through expensive integrations on proprietary IVR and CTI platforms. With the arrival of VoIP and the open source PBX, the cost of establishing and maintaining converged voice/data applications is rapidly dropping. Adding further advantage is the current SOA-enablement trend; large and small application vendors are layering web services atop their current and legacy systems to reduce integration hurdles. BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) has become the standard for orchestration of these rapidly emerging web services. In this presentation, I will demonstrate the integration of Asterisk with web services through BPEL for use in self-service and other applications. While we have developed only a proof-of-concept, we want others in the Asterisk community to benefit from our experience.

Keith McFarlane, Oracle

Keith McFarlane started his career as a software developer at AT&T designing and building first and third party telephony software, contact center routing and workflow infrastructures, and CRM analytics applications. Within his 12-year stint in the telecom industry, he transitioned with the Lucent and Avaya spinoffs, moving into software architecture and management roles. He is now a Development Manager for CRM architecture at Oracle, where he and his team are prototyping the next generation of CRM applications on Oracle's Fusion Middleware.

Asterisk Business Edition - What, Why, and How?

Asterisk Business Edition is a commercial product based on the Open Source Version of Asterisk. What are the differences between the two versions? Why did Digium create a Commercial version? How does Business Edition benefit the Open Source community, and how Digium handle any potential conflicts between the commercial and Open Source versions? These questions and more will be addressed.

Jim Webster, Digium

Jim Webster is Director of Software Technologies at Digium, Inc. His responsibilities include managing Asterisk Business Edition, Digum's Software Verification Lab, and the Interoperability Certification program. He began working with Digium as a consultant in January 2005 and assumed a full-time position in March.

Jim has over 20 years' experience in the software and telecommunications fields as a developer, engineering manager, and product manager. From 1997-2004, Jim was employed by Conexant Systems, Inc. (formerly Rockwell Semiconductor), where he managed embedded Linux distributions for Conexant's Home Network Processor chipset family. He was also responsible for various R&D, interoperability, and marketing efforts for the AccessRunner DSL chip, which in 2003 became the best-selling ADSL modem design the world. Prior to Conexant, Jim held engineering management and software design positions at Digi International and Motorola, where he wrote firmware, led software teams, and drove standards initiatives for ISDN, networking, and modem products. Jim holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Auburn University.

Case study: Deploying Asterisk for the town of Manchester

This talk describes a deployment of Asterisk for the Town of Manchester, Connecticut. Over 1,500 IP phones are being connected to 4 Asterisk servers and 2 Asterisk gateways. The installation serves all of the school districts, administrative offices, fire and police departments of the town. This may be the largest Asterisk deployment for a local government to date. Some interesting aspects of the deployment will be covered, including the failover and redundancy implemented, as well as a dial plan that spans multiple servers.

Rana Dutt, CEO, Softel

Rana Dutt is Founder and CEO of Softel Solutions, a Telecom Solution Provider specializing in large scale IP PBX deployments and hosted PBX solutions. Prior to founding Softel, he was Chief Technology Officer at Flash Networks, where he conceived a successful strategy to provide data compression solutions for Cellular Providers. Before that he was Lead Architect and developer for much of the Call Processing and Voice Mail software for Avaya's Merlin Legend PBX and Partner Key Systems, which were two of the most popular phone systems for small businesses in the U.S. Rana holds a patent in Store and Forward Technology earned at Bell Labs, and has a M.S. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley.

AMP - the Asterisk Management Panel

A presentation of the Open Source graphical user interface to Asterisk.

Ronald P. Hartmann, VerCom Systems

Ronald Hartmann is an Electrical Engineer by Education and has been involved with Interactive Voice Response systems starting back in 1990 using the Dialogic Cards running on the Unix Platform, where he conceptualized, designed, and project managed the development of IVR systems for Procter and Gamble, Oil Distributors, Shell Oil Company. Ronald was the founders a network integration company working primarily in the Medical Market Space, after being acquired by a fortune 50 company Ronald joined forces with a few other business associates and formed VerCom Systems a company dedicated to VOIP and the furtherance of Open Source Software. Finally, Ronald joined forces with the AMP Project as a developer and is excited about its growth and maturity it has already experienced.