[asterisk-biz] The hunt for a workable Asterisk GUI

[Chris Bagnall]

Greetings list,

I've traditionally been a proponent of the "manual configuration " approach, using .conf files and command lines to give us the greatest possible flexibility when writing call flows for customers. I've shied away from web interfaces as being overly restrictive and limiting what we can do for our customers.

However, as we've grown as a company, taken on more customers (and hence more staff), there's become an ever-growing need for certain operations to be carried out by admin staff, rather than always having to be passed down to technical staff (who often have better things to do). I'm sure it's a problem faced by many companies on the list.

So, what to do about it? Obviously there are "user-friendly" interfaces like FreePBX available, but they take over the *whole* asterisk config, shoehorning the user into their own fairly tight confines. Don't get me wrong, FreePBX is great as a company PBX installed on an on-site server, but it isn't much good as a VoIP hosting platform.

What I think we're looking for is a fairly simple web interface to manipulate the tables used by Realtime. It doesn't have to be friendly. It doesn't have to be pretty. It just has to be easy enough for admin staff to use (with training, obviously) so that trivial call flow changes such as "please forward my calls to this mobile number" or "can you add extension 241 to this queue/ring group" can be made without having to involve technical staff.

Would be very interested to hear what others in a similar position have done to overcome this growth problem. Did you write your own interface? Did you buy something off the shelf? Is there something in the FOSS marketplace that'll do the job?

Regards,

Chris
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