[Asterisk-Users] Small office with all employee's offsite

[Aldo Bergamini]

asterisk-users-request at lists.digium.com is believed to have said: 

Jason,

>I'm sure these questions have been answered at some point, but I'm too new 
>to this stuff to know the right words to plug into the search function to 
>find what I need.

well, yes of course.

>I have never touched Asterisk before, but have wanted to for some time. 
>Now I finally think I'm going to bite the bullet, as I have a real-world 
>application for it!

You are in for some fun and satisfaction; with some small price to pay...

>My office consists of two employees, neither of whom work in the office 
>physically.  Here is what I'd like to do.  Hopefully someone can tell me 
>what I need to do/buy/configure/install to make it work...

As a minimum set up you will need a CPU plus an interface to your
incoming phone lines and most likely to an extension line in the main office.

>I want all calls to come into the Asterisk box in the main office.

Obvious.

>I want all incoming calls to be recorded (not as concerned about outgoing 
>calls)

Can be done from the dialplan.

>Both employees have regular POTS telephone lines (one fellow has a land 
>line and a cell, the other has just a land-line).
>
>I'd like callers to be presented with a short menu of options, the 
>behavior of which might change depending on the time of day (for instance, 
>at night, I'd like both the "sales" and "support" calls to go to one 
>employee, while during the day I'd like sales to go to one person, and 
>support to go to another.  I'd also like to have an answering machine 
>(built into Asterisk?) pick up calls that go unanswered.

Can be done from the dialplan. Voicemail is an Asterisk application.

>I guess that's about it.  I looked at the Digium TDMxx cards, but don't 
>really know what I need in the way of FXO's and FXS's to pull off what I 
>want to do.

That's a very good option.

>As an added bonus, if someone knows of a VOIP adapter that allows one to 
>plug an analog phone into it AND accept both VOIP and normal phone calls 
>to the same phone, that would be cool (and might make things easier to 
>configure, without making each extension 100% dependent on VOIP).

You could look into products from Sipura or from Grandstream.

>Thanks in advance.  I'm really looking forward to finally doing something 
>with Asterisk, one of the most exciting projects I've looked at for a 
>while!!

But the very best advice I can give you is to start getting used to the
Asterisk wiki and get the O'Reilly book on Asterik: it will be your
friend. That's the small price to be paid.

I found it worth.

Regards
Aldo