[Asterisk-Users] Need HELP to put * in use for good cause

[Michael Giagnocavo]

Have you tried contacting Microsoft? Depending on the situation, you might
be able to get very low prices or even free (yes, as in cost) licenses for
your desktops. Microsoft can be very generous with non-profit and aid
organizations. 

Just from a practical standpoint, that might be easier since it'll be no
retraining or loss/change of functionality.

-Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Achilleus
Papadopoulos
Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 6:00 AM
To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Need HELP to put * in use for good cause

Dear all,
I volunteer for a non profit organization that
provides support and crisis counseling to troubled
youth, dealing with matters such as alcohol/substance
abuse, sexual abuse/harassment, domestic violence,
etc. Being the most computer literate in our group of
volunteers Im acting as sort of network
administrator. Our office is currently equipped with
donated HW running various versions of Windoze in a
peer to peer network configuration (10 PCs) and an old
four-line Panasonic analog PBX (24 extensions). The
users of this equipment are counselors that are
arranged in 3 shifts of 10 people each, since we
operate 24/7/365. The op originally intended to act as
a person to person thing but weve increasingly used
phone and email as the majority of our cases wish to
remain anonymous. Our technical infrastructure is
starting to fail our purpose because we cannot tend to
the call load volume. Callers get the busy tone a lot
or calls are dropped. Our budget is really limited as
it currently only comes from donations so we decided
to go Open Source to avoid licensing in a major system
overhaul were planning, thus found Asterisk! What we
are planning is to move the PCs to a
Linux/KDE/Evolution environment. Evolution was the PIM
preferred because of the similarity to MS Outlook
which the counselors are currently using
(unlicensed/illegal copies) but we encountered a
problem: Over time we have amassed a large database of
contacts that users share with LDAP/Outlook and when
they perform a contact lookup they can easily call the
contact trough Outlook with its built in dialer as
every phone is connected to a modem. Moreover, with
the Journal enabled the users have a record of the
phone calls made to every contact. How can we
implement the same or similar TAPI functionality with
Ximian Evolution, LDAP, SIP phones and Asterisk? I
searched the wiki and mail lists and could not find a
definitive way of doing this. Can any one please help
me with this? 


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail 
_______________________________________________
Asterisk-Users mailing list
Asterisk-Users at lists.digium.com
http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
   http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users