System information

Foreword
“There’s more than one way to do it.” I’ve been working with Asterisk for nine years,
and this motto becomes more true with each release, each added feature, and each
clever person who attacks a telecommunications problem with this incredibly flexible
toolkit. I had the fantastic opportunity to work as the community manager for the
Asterisk project at Digium for two years, which gave me one of the best vantage points
for seeing the scope and imagination of the worldwide development effort pushing
Asterisk forward. The depth and breadth of Asterisk is staggering—installations with
hundreds of thousands of users are now commonplace. I see Asterisk making deep
inroads into the financial, military, hospital, Fortune 100 enterprise, service provider,
calling card, and mobile environments. In fact, there really aren’t any areas that I can
think of where Asterisk isn’t now entrenched as the default choice when there is a need
for a generalized voice tool to do “stuff.”
Asterisk has been emblematic of the way that open source software has changed busi-
ness—and changed the world. My favorite part of any Asterisk project overview or
conference talk is answering questions from someone new to Asterisk. As I continue
to answer “Yes, it can do that,” I watch as the person’s eyes grow wide. The person
starts to smile when he really starts to think about new things to do that his old phone
or communication system couldn’t possibly have done. Radio integration? Sure.
Streaming MP3s into or out of phone calls? OK. Emailing recorded conference calls to
the participants? No problem. Integration of voice services into existing Java apps?
Easy. Fax? Instant messages? IVRs? Video? Yes, yes, yes, yes.
The affirmative answers just keep flowing, and at that point, the best thing to do is to
sit the person down and start showing him quick demonstrations of how Asterisk can
be quickly deployed and developed. Then, I typically point the person toward the first
edition of this book, Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, and set him loose. In just a few
hours of development (or longer, of course), companies can change the way they deliver
products to customers, nonprofits can overhaul how their users interact with the serv-
ices they offer, and individuals can learn to build a perfectly customized call-handling
system for their mobile and home phones. Asterisk scales up and down from individual
lines to vast multiserver installations across multiple continents, but the way to start is
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