[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk as a stand alone voice mail server

[Siggi Langauf]

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Ronnie Earle wrote:

> I'm sure asterisk would make a great stand alone voice mail server.
> Basically I want to get rid of our voice mail system and replace it with
> *, but the problem is we use a cisco cluster with skinny clients. So I
> was thinking the way to contact a * server, would be through our 3640.
> But so far any attempt has failed. I am wondering if anyone has done
> something similar. Just want to verify the idea is sound. Please keep in
> mind I just heard of * a few days ago and don't know much about it.
> Though it seems pretty easy to use. At least configuring a couple
> clients was not that tough. Thanks to John Todd for his easy to follow
> guide at www.onlamp.com.
>
> Anyone with something similar? if so some info on what you did would
> help a lot.

Yup, I'm currently running such a system. Right now only ~10 test
mailboxes, but planned to be deployed for a medium-sized (~250) user base.

We're running Cisco CallManager 3.3 with Cisco 7940 and 7960 Skinny
phones. * is registered to the CallManager as an H.323 gateway (using the
chan_oh323 driver, chan_h323 didn't work with the Cisco cluster).

This setup seems to work fine so far, even though * drops calls that are
put on hold, and it has slightly worse jitter than a hard gateway.
Moreover, * can be (ab)used to gateway calls from CCM via IAX, SIP, MGP or
even analog or ISDN zaptel lines. That gives you nice options of linking
to all known other VoIP systems...

Currently, the biggest challenge is a sane menu-driven voicemail interface
on the Cisco phones (via XML service, as our users dislike the idea of
IVR menus). I got that somehow working, but in the current prototype, you
have to dial into a pseudo extension on * in order to be able to play
something through the phone, which is quite ugly...

Other minor wishlist items include: German voicemail prompts, Message
Waiting indicator on the phone, IMAP based voicemail storage (so you can
access voicemail via MUA, Web interface, XML Service or IVR menu without
getting message spools out of sync)

I guess I could wrap up a set of patches and a few PHP scripts by next
week, if anybody is interested.

Cheers,
	Siggi