[Asterisk-biz] success stories?

[James Harper]

Thanks for the input.

> I would strongly advise against making your first asterisk deployment
for
> a paying customer. Asterisk is a PBX toolkit, that's all. It requires
a
> ton of integration and comes with no end user interface. Every voip
phone
> has its own quirks and not all of the features on all of the phones
work
> with asterisk. You are on your own to discover what they are.

That's one of the questions I'll ask later - what phone's work and what
don't, but there's probably enough data on enough phones already.

> I have been
> using Asterisk for over a year and have sold a few PBX's but I am not
> going to be selling any more asterisk based pbx's until I get a lot
better
> at it and develop a much better integrated product. I have lost a
> significant amount of money on asterisk so far. I've learned these
lessons
> the hard way. I would also highly recommend knowing C and following
the
> asterisk cvs very closely.

I'm a seasoned C developer (although I use .net mostly these days) and
have submitted a few kernel patches in my time. 

> You will inevitably end up patching things by
> hand as well. If a customer says anything about needing H323 tell them
you
> can't help them. Seriously. If they say they need an operator console
with
> lots of buttons tell them you can't help them. There is plenty more I
> could share but I don't want this to become any more of a rant.

They currently have a very simple phone system. It does have a console
and I'll be testing a few options concerning that before I do anything
about it.

If you think it's not relevant to the list, I'd me delighted if you
could email me privately if you have more to say - the more input the
better.

Thanks

James