<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.5730.11" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>>YMMV. Mine certainly did. For the better.
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>My comments were more negative than I
intended. My installation is "worthless" at this point because it is only
a cookbook example and I haven't tried to modify it to meet my needs. I
didn't intend to imply that Asterisk is worthless, just that I've only gotten to
the point of a trivial demo.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>My main concern is that the documentation isn't for
the faint of heart. If one doesn't devote many hours, on a regular,
ongoing basis, they may never get to the point of understanding it enough to
apply it to a real-world situation. The more I explore and the more
feedback I get, the more I find is there. I just got a very nice posting
from Tzafir showing me a web domain I didn't even know existed. Not
surprising, it is a lot like Linux--everyone has there own idea of what is
needed and how it should be done, so it becomes a monster that is hard to get a
handle on. From what I've seen so far, the commands far exceed any
commercial PABX I've ever used or evaluated. It is very powerful, but the
learning curve is immense, and I'm both a CS professional and a telephony
professional.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I'm not abandoning it by any means, but am
frustrated at even where to jump in. I excitedly bought the O-Reily book,
only to find that for all 1000 pages, it never provided anything that could be
considered a reference manual and that its tutorials weren't even a good fit to
my needs. It did get me two SIP phones talking to each other and to a
softphone, but only after hours of experimenting with SIP phone settings and
contacts with the manufacturers (who knew even less about VoIP).</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I think part of the problem is that the only people
who know enough about * to address the documentation problems are busy either
developing hardware and software for it or using it to run their businesses and
don't have time to address the documentation problem, which is
understandable. Also, once a person gets to that level of knowledge, its
easy to forget how little a newcomer knows and leave out a lot of necessary
details.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Wilton</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV></BODY></HTML>