Origin
The Asterisk project started in 1999, Mark Spencer was the person who released the initial code under the GPL open source license. Though it was initially developed in the United States, Asterisk has turned into a popular VoIP PBX worldwide. The main reason is that it is freely available under open source licensing, and has a modular, extensible design. Asterisk has been enhanced and tested by a global community of thousands. Today, it is maintained by Digium and the Asterisk community.
Features
Here are the main features of Asterisk:
- Asterisk is a complete business phone system, which handles all kinds of communication between phones and devices within the system, and also acts as a gateway channeling communication in and out of the system, through either the traditional phone or cellular network or Voice over Internet Protocol.
- An interactive voice response (IVR). It gives you the opportunity of automating the interaction between your phone system and employees or customers.
- A VoIP Gateway. There are multiple advantages associated with VoIP in the context of businesses. Asterisk acts as a bridge between your VoIP phone system and the traditional telephony systems out there.
- A call recording tool
- A voice mail server and many other features.
In order to set-up Asterisk and get it running on your computer you need the following:
- Linux operating system
- Asterisk installation. You can download it for free from digium.com.
- Knowledge of how to install and program Asterisk. You can also install some other software that will provide a user-friendly interface for you to have your Asterisk system without actually being geeky.
A very interesting video- Introduction to Asterisk done by Billy Chia please find below:)