Business Telephone Systems

Asterisk Consultancy, Design and Installation

Asterisk is an open-source, powerful software implementation of a telephone private branch exchange (PBX). It allows users to create a fully functional telephone system with an existing computer and traditional telephone lines or Voice over IP (VoIP) connections. It includes many features such as voicemail, call routing, call forwarding, call hunting, and interactive voice response (IVR) menus. Asterisk supports a wide range of telephony hardware and protocols, making it a popular choice for businesses, schools, call centers, and other organisations that need a flexible, reliable phone system.

Asterisk can offer many benefits to businesses and organisations, including:

• Cost Savings: Because Asterisk is open-source software, it is free to use and can be run on relatively low-cost hardware, which can result in significant cost savings compared to proprietary PBX systems.
• Flexibility: Asterisk can be configured and customised to meet the specific needs of an organisation, and it supports a wide range of telephony hardware and protocols, allowing it to be integrated with existing infrastructure.
• Scalability: Asterisk can be easily scaled up to handle a large number of concurrent calls and support a growing number of users, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes.
• Advanced Features: Asterisk comes with a wide variety of advanced features that are typically found in proprietary PBX systems, including voicemail, call routing, call forwarding, call hunting, and IVR menus.
• VoIP Support: Asterisk supports both traditional telephone lines and VoIP connections, making it possible to take advantage of the cost savings and flexibility of VoIP while still maintaining compatibility with traditional phone systems.
• Open source: Due to being open source, it has a large community that is developing and maintaining it, hence having a wide range of add-on and support.
• High Availability: Asterisk has a capability to support multiple servers in distributed setup, hence providing high availability.

Features

• Voice Mail: Includes advanced voicemail capabilities, including the ability to forward voicemail to email and to retrieve voicemail messages via the phone or email.
• Call Routing Allows users to configure custom call routing rules based on time of day, caller ID, and other factors, to ensure that calls are directed to the appropriate person or department.
• Call Forwarding Enables users to forward incoming calls to another phone number, either on a permanent or conditional basis.
• Call Queuing: Allows calls to be placed in a queue and answered by the next available agent, which is great for call centers.
• Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Provides automated phone menus that allow callers to navigate through different options and reach the appropriate person or department.
• Conferencing: allows multiple users to participate in a conference call.
• Music on Hold: Allows playing music or messages on hold, with different option to play for different type of callers.
• Call Detail Records (CDR): Provides detailed records of all calls for billing, reporting, and analysis.
• Automatic call Distribution (ACD): routing call to the agent based on the skills.
• Text-to-Speech (TTS) & Speech-to-Text (STT): It supports different Text-to-Speech engines and Speech-to-Text engine, allowing to use the features like voice recognition, voice commands.
• Remote Management: provides the ability to manage and monitor the Asterisk server remotely, using a web-based interface.
• Fax-to-Email: Faxes can be received and emailed to the user as a PDF or TIFF attachment.