[asterisk-users] Beginners Guide to setting up a Call Centre

[Jeff LaCoursiere]

On Tue, 12 Jan 2010, Richard Kenner wrote:

>> Your comments both come from having taken a short look at FreePBX and
>> dismissed it without investigating how powerful it can be.
>
> Yes, but the discussion is about COMPLEXITY, not power!

I thought the discussion was about how an IT guy with no previous asterisk 
experience could get up and running the fastest.  By FAR that answer is to 
use one of the pre-packaged installations such as TrixBox or Elastix.

>
> Sure, there are "hooks" where you can do anything you want, but if you
> were to set up identical configurations via FreePBX and by writing a
> dialplan (and other config files) from scratch, the latter will be the
> least complex.

By whose estimation?  To even get that far with asterisk requires a lot of 
reading and experience.  It took me several weeks to get my first 
installation answering the phone in 2003, before there were any serious 
GUIs available.

My first intallation of Asterisk at Home, however, was answering the phone in 
about 2 hours.

>
> What that means is that if your goal is to learn the least about
> Asterisk that you can get away with, but that you expect to need to
> tweak the dialplan, doing so is going to have a lower learning curve
> if you JUST use Asterisk: using FreePBX just means that you have to
> learn BOTH systems and that you'll be modifying a more complex
> configuration than if you did it yourself.
>

The thing is the OP probably won't need to tweak the dialplan to do what 
he needs to do.

My take is this - if you want to get started with Asterisk and you have NO 
experience, a pre-built package like Asterisk NOW, PIF, Trixbox, or 
Elastix is the quickest and cleanest way to get setup and running.  After 
having some experience with it and finding the things that may require 
some custom dialplan work (getting harder and harder to find given the 
most recent releases of FreePBX and the things possible from the GUI), you 
can then learn the internals of dialplan coding and work that out over 
time.

For someone starting from scratch, learning to setup Asterisk properly and 
coding your first diaplan - even using the samples - is difficult and 
non-intuitive.

j