Asterisk@Home

Summary

Asterisk as a system is extremely flexible as we are now well aware. However the addition of a powerful tool such as SugarCRM makes it more than simply the telecommunications provider for the organization. It becomes the focal center of all communication, be it incoming, outgoing, or internal.

We can use Asterisk and this CRM combined to plan entire projects and monitor their progress from start to finish. We can plan, make, and receive emails, calls, faxes, and meetings. We can determine how long we spent on tasks towards a specific account or project and we can see who was involved in all the conversations.

This paves the way for a variety of reports and analysis on how our business runs, which just isn't easily possible without the integration and flexibility of our open-source telecommunications system. This added functionality is exactly what the Asterisk system is designed to do. It excels as the powerful back-end technology running behind an integrated and feature-rich system.

The flip-side to this sort of integration is that all our eggs are in one basket—we have no distribution of data. This can be a major problem to us as our Asterisk system expands. The functionality of Asterisk@Home is available in Asterisk with the required add-ons (AMP, FOP, etc.). With our own Asterisk build we can host some of these services on different machines, therefore spreading the load and the data. As mentioned earlier, Asterisk@Home is great for smaller installations as an excellent "plug and play" telephone system. If we expect significant growth or are starting with an already medium to large organization then we should consider building our Asterisk system from scratch.

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