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Asterisk@Home

As we discussed when introducing Asterisk, flexibility is a primary focus. Asterisk can be used for a variety of different purposes and each available feature can be tailored to the specific needs of any organization. Asterisk@Home retains some of the flexibility and adds a massive amount of convenience and ease of use. It offers web-based configuration, web access to voice mail, reporting, and other functions, which we will cover shortly. All these functions can be added to your own Asterisk installation as they are all based on existing Asterisk tools; the real benefit of Asterisk@Home is that you don't have to set these up manually to make them work together. Asterisk@Home installs and sets up the base configuration for all of the tools it provides.

It's extremely easy to set up and use; the downside to this is that you lose some of the flexibility—you can't choose which OS to base your Asterisk system on, for example, and you can't fully customize the configuration, which becomes a hindrance in larger Asterisk installations.. Its name, however, understates its scope; there have even been discussions to change it because of its confusing nature. Its functionality goes quite a bit beyond that needed by a home user and it can be easily set up to handle a small-to- medium-sized business's calling needs. However, beyond that size, it becomes a bit harder to scale effectively than a plain Asterisk install.

CentOS

Asterisk@Home is designed around the CentOS distribution of Linux. CentOS is built from the Red Hat Enterprise source packages. It has a relatively small core team of developers that concentrate on packaging the OS without Red Hat's proprietary components. The main focus of CentOS is to provide a freely available operating system with the packages and features needed at enterprise level, without the cost associated of the base distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. CentOS does, however, offer a range of commercial support, which is invaluable to most enterprises and thus is an option we can consider.