[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk Jobs

[John Millican]

On Sunday January 08 2006 12:23 pm, Kerry Garrison wrote:
> > Asterisk drastically lowers barriers of entry in the field of
> > commercial telephony systems. Besides, the wiki, the mailing
> > list and the IRC channels make it relatively easy to get
> > started with the system. This "no-pointy-clicky no-brainer
> > interface" actually allows you to gain more in-depth
> > knowledge about telephony and VoIP.
>
> Have your worked with any other PBX system? Learning Asterisk is extremely
> product-centric. Knowing how to create a dialplan in Asterisk does not
> necessarily translate into how you create a dialplan on Call Manager or
> 3Com NBX, or TalkSwitch, or Panasonic, or Toshiba, or Mitel, or anything
> else. Adding a phone and extension is different on each system, etc etc
> etc.
>
> The advantage of Asterisk is that you can pull obsolete hardware out of
> your junkyard and get a system up and running and begin learning general
> telephony and voip methods and terms. I'm not sure why you feel editing
> config files manually helps your learn faster than using an interface such
> as AMP. I totally disagree with that, if you don't have to learn all of the
> syntax all up front and you have an easy means of doing 100% of your
> configuration through an interface, you will learn how to setup and manage
> a system much faster.
>
> Kerry Garrison
I disagree.  In my opinion if one learns how to do everthing only through a 
GUI they are not learning what is actually happing.  If you are unaware of 
what is going on under the hood you will have far greater difficulty finding 
the problem when something goes wrong.  The GUI says all is great but it 
doesn't work, Oh my god what do I do now.  Having said that i go back to an 
earlier post about different people learning in different ways.  this is very 
true, but it requires more work to learn the underpinnings after learning the 
GUI.  If you are forced to learn the inner working first you can then move to 
the GUI and have a better idea of what went wrong when it does. I will 
consent that it is easier to learn how to set something up via a GUI but I 
don't feel that is the best way.
My 2 cents.
John Millican