Asterisk-Elastix VoIP - Learn to Build Phone System

Learn Elastix IP Telephony server configurations and deployment with course project.

Course Description

• Do you need a cost effective phone system for business?
• Are you tired of paying licensing cost to the proprietary phone system ?
• Do you want to expand your business and require phone system but legacy system don't allow you ?
• You are interested to learn asterisk but like to avoid command line and linux shell at the start ?

Elastix is the world most popular and widely adopted open source IP telephony software. The core VoIP communication is based on Asterisk - The most powerful IP telephony platform. This course is designed for the newbies, small & medium business that like to use the IP telephony - PBX or even the solution providers that like to gear up for telephony services to the end users.

The course starts with initial telephony concepts and terms used in phone service industry. No prior technical knowledge about telecommunication required to take this course.

The course has project depicting the real world scenario. This helps the students to have activity based learning and can apply learned knowledge to the real world. The course clearly explained the phone system features with lab practice for configurations.

Proprietary systems invites a license fee for most Business-critical features and UC Features like mobility and third party integration. To avoid the expensive add-ons go the open source way.

Use a single system to manage multiple tools and platforms, thereby having “greater employee productivity, reduced costs and a means to improve customer engagement.

What are the requirements?

• Download the Elastix software but don't we will cover in Installation lecture.
• Download Softphone e.g Zoiper or Xlite. Will show you configuration in lecture 04.

For the complete course details please visit the below link. 

Elastix IP Telephony Complete Video Training. 

Difference between Asterisk trixbox Elastix AsteriskNow PBX in Flash freepbx

As a Asterisk professional I came across several people asking for the difference between asterisk, trixbox, Elastix, AsteriskNow, PBX in Flash or even FreePBX.

So the answer is there is no difference at all. Each one of these above mentioned software are running the Asterisk as core telephony engine and front end as FreePBX  moreover trixbox and Elastix has modified the look and feel of free open source available freePBX. (http://www.freepbx.org) and has created their own version of front end tool. 

now the question which one is best to use, so the best and trouble free is plain asterisk that you download from asterisk.org and compiled it  as its exactly contains what you need and you don't get unnecessary software packages and binaries like in case of trixbox ce and elastix where you get many un-used packages that you don't even requires in some cases for example MySQL, Apache, extra Sound files and there are many more. 

Moreover my experience with trixbox is, its mainly run several AGI (Asterisk Gateway Interface) scripts that are developed in PERL language and if overloaded it crashes frequently and on main dashboard it also show you wrong indicator of CPU usage and you keep on restarting your server (in case if you are newbie) where actually there is no such issue with CPU load.

To have a survival skills to run asterisk base system you need to be average computer programmer because when you design your dialplan (heart of asterisk). It has its own scripting like language and have computer programming like language constructs (variables, expressions, if -if then else statement, sub-routine) etc.

other then this you also need to be good Linux administrator that can perform basic task as well.

Asterisk is daemon service that run on Linux so to run the service you need to be able to perform operating system maintenance task. 

If you are working for a call center/customer contact center, you must have also RDBMS skills as well to maintain the CDR (Call Detail Report). 

Regards!

Numan Khan

Expert-Voice