[Asterisk-Users] asterisk gui?

[Jim Van Meggelen]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com 
> [mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of hank
> Sent: November 22, 2004 3:57 PM
> To: Asterisk-Users at lists.digium.com
> Subject: [Asterisk-Users] asterisk gui?
> 
> 
> hello is there a gui that would allow me to configure everything from
> phones, to extentions, to voice mail to basicly everything that 
> asterisk can do?

THAT, my friend, is a tall order. Asterisk is in many ways more like a
scripting language than a PBX; certainly in terms of its flexibility.
What I mean by this is that the possibilities with Asterisk are so
varied that even the most adaptable GUI will on some level have to
impose a limitation on it.

Perhaps rather than a GUI we should be wanting an IDE (as in Integrated
Development Environment, not Intelligent Drive Electronics . . . bloody
overlapping acronyms . . . but I digress . . . ).

Even some basic syntax highlighting would improve the readability of
extensions.conf immensely. Anyone know how to make THAT work in vim?
I've hacked one together for UltraEdit that works reasonably well, but
that's a Windows editor.

> I did go to
> www.voip-info.org
> and none of the guis I saw there do the trick and the ones that come
close 
> aren't downloadable just wanted to see status on this

The GUIs that are out there consist of pre-defined interfaces to
functions the designers deemed useful. None of them come close to
harnessing the true potential of Asterisk (yet). Nevertheless, many of
them are extremely interesting and show great promise. In the future,
these GUIs may evolve in a manner similar to GNOME or KDE, where the
most popular functions have been addressed in a manner acceptable to
most users. But even the most comprehensive GUI couldn't hope to keep up
with the rapid evolution of Asterisk.

The folks at voxbox.ca very generously released their GUI creation to
the community. It is known as AMP (Asterisk Management Portal) and is
currently the one to watch. Give it six months to a year to build a
solid developer community. The AMP list on Sourceforge is VERY active.

The folks at Bicom Systems have done some very interesting stuff as
well, but it's all closed up. Hard to even tell it's Asterisk.

Regardless, for the time being the sage advice is to learn the conf
files. There's no better way to properly grasp the staggering potential
of Asterisk.

Cheers,

Jim.