[Asterisk-Users] Silly questions due to ingrained knowledge of analog phone use.

[John Todd]

This is not an explicit answer to all of your questions, but...

1) There is currently no intercom functionality supported by Asterisk 
as an "in-band" method of communicating with phones.  There is the 
ability to make audio on a phone call appear out of the sound-out 
port on a soundcard, which may be what you're after if you have a PA 
system of some sort.

2) You can do everything you're looking for with Asterisk.  Spend a 
bit of money on some hardphones (Cisco ATA-186 is my personal bias, 
since they have 2 lines and they're cheap) and get an X100P analog 
adapter.  Everything you've mentioned can be demo'ed with that 
configuraion.

JT


>Greetings all!
>
>	I've got some really silly questions. I'm a technical guy, 
>and I understand
>how the astrisk server works and how VOIP works, etc... The problem I have is
>that at my small company we have a phone system with analog lines and
>everyone here is comfortable with the concept of using them. I've never seen
>IP phones in action so I don't know how they work from a users point of view.
>
>For instance, we have 10 lines here. I'd someone calls for me, the person who
>answered the phone puts them on hold, intecoms me at my desk, if I'm not
>there he "all pages" me (announcement via speaker on all unused phones). If
>he gets ahold of me he tells me that so-and-so is on line X, and I can either
>pick up line X or tell him to put him into my voice mail. How would that
>sequance go if I had an astrisk PBX and IP phones everywhere? I need to wrap
>my brain around the concepts of *using* IP phones before I can go and think
>about setting up a system to use them.
>
>I thank in advance anyone who can spare the time to help me understand this
>better. I really love what Astrisk could do for us here, and I'm hopeing that
>I can get it set up and useable without too much culture shock for the users.
>Thanks again!
>
>Benjamin Long
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