I can configure Asterisk to make calls between extensions. But that’s it…
From what i understand, in order to do anything else, you probably need to have “Developer” skills.

The “Chasm” Asterisk needs to pass is the one of being user friendly, and not simply being addressed to geeky / nerdy users who will spends a week or two on phone software.
I want to click my way through the configuration, not have to configure configuration files for my system to do what i want.

Anyway in the end i’m just happy to of have found the 3CX PhoneSystem. Windows based, intuitive, “CLICK ABLE” no need to go into complex linux folders and change files. Everything is done from a main configuration panel via you friendly windows environment.

I would say “Only if Asterisk Supported all that”… But i’ll refrain from doing so since i prefer 3CX over Asterisk.
It gets the job done without having to tediously hire a linux guru or having to learn complex Asterisk commands.

That was until I came across the PBX in a Flash (PiaF) distribution of Asterisk. This new distribution (just over a year old) is installed using an iso image that installs and updates the software. It combines all of the tools needed to configure Asterisk through the excellent web based interfaces: Webmin and FreePBX. It makes it easy to configure IAXy, fxs, SIP extensions, voicemail, trunks, IVR, etc.. without writing a dialplan based on coding. Kudos to the PiaF team!

I started using PiaF in March of 2008 and contributed by creating the website PBX in a Flash for Newbies Newbies. I teach Telecommunications in a Polytechnical institute and have had the chance to test and interface Asterisk to many legacy systems: Nortel Meridian systems, DMS-100 supernodes, MTX cellsite switches, Cisco Call Manager Express, etc.. The other telecom instructors and Cisco instructors are astounded with PiaF capabilities and especially with the ease and speed in configuring extensions and trunks.

Asterisk, through PiaF, is ready for prime time.

Callweaver has attempted to improve the situation by replacing a number of the key flawed components with either implementations leveraging some other solid open source project, or by rewriting when necessary. This helps a lot, but at the core, it’s still the same flawed Asterisk design.

I have a number of both Asterisk and Callweaver deployments under my belt, and certainly a few years ago, Asterisk was the only option. I have no regrets having used it, it has allowed me to do things in telephony I had never imagined would have been possible a decade ago. In fact, I would have probably never got involved in telephony had it not been for Asterisk. It has served it’s purpose and served it while (despite all it’s flaws).

However, for now, the future of IP telephony in my opinion, no longer lies with Asterisk or it’s derivatives. FreeSWITCH is the future.

FreeSWITCH is a younger project obviously, and hence there’s a few things that might be easy to do in Asterisk, yet a little bit more cumbersome than one would want in FS, but there’s so many things that FS does better than Asterisk, it blows my mind. In addition, there’s so many things that you can do with FS that you’ll never be able to do with Asterisk (at least not in any way as clean and elegant, and without having to write a C module). FS is well designed and it doesn’t get in the way. It really is a pleasure to use and so powerful at the same time. It’s also fairly well documented (by the project itself).

That said, you pretty much need to be a programmer to make good use of FS. Certain things that could be done in Asterisk in extensions.[conf|ael] are going to require writing a few lines of code (and I mean, Javascript, Perl, Python, or one of the other languages FS has some support for), but that’s actually part of the beauty of FS. Other things that required a convoluted mess to achieve in Asterisk are often achievable in some simple, clean and elegant way in FS.

That said, FS, due it’s design will certainly yield some PBX projects built on top of it that will have a much better chance at offering a friendly, yet powerful PBX offering. Things LaTeX on top of TeX if you will.

What you’re saying is that Asterisk is the sendmail of telephony.

For those who don’t understand - sendmail comes with a legendarily complex config file, and sendmail’s developers also completely missed the point that they were asking their users to be programmers, and not just that, but to program in a terrible language.

The phone model is different from the Internet model from a business point of view: you can get money from every “page hit”. So hosting PBX applications can be a good businness. And if you make it easy for web developpers to integrate a phone (audio) interface into their web application you will give them an additional way to make money.

So we need easy Asterisk hosting and framework integration with web applications !

You can do nice things like calling scripts from the extensions in the XML dialplan, there is also YAML support through mod_yaml.

There is also socket support (mod_event_socket), xml-rpc, I believe they are also working on JSON/REST support for writing web apps on top of it.

You can also abstract the low level functionality into a high level fashion using scripting languages or XML/YAML, etc.

FS rocks.