Asterisk has a wealth of features to help you customize your PBX to fill very specific business needs. This short cookbook offers recipes for tackling dialplan fundamentals, making and controlling calls, and monitoring channels in your PBX environment. Each recipe includes a simple code solution you can put to work immediately, along with a detailed discussion that offers insight into why and how the recipe works.
This book focuses on Asterisk 1.8, although many of the conventions and information presented are version-agnostic. These recipes include solutions to help you:
Authenticate callers before moving on in your dialplan
Redirect calls received by your auto-attendant
Create an automatic call-back service
Initiate hot-desking to login to and accept calls at any office device
Monitor and interrupt live calls to train new employees at a call center
Record calls from your Asterisk dialplan
Chapter 1 Dialplan Fundamentals
Introduction
Counting and Conditionals
Looping in the Dialplan
Controlling Calls Based on Date and Time
Authenticating Callers
Authenticating Callers Using Voicemail Credentials
Leif Madsen first got involved with the Asterisk community when he was looking for a voice conferencing solution. Once he learned that there was no official Asterisk documentation, he co-founded the Asterisk Documentation Project. Leif is currently working as a consultant, specializing in Asterisk clustering and call-center integration. You can get more information at http://www.leifmadsen.com.
Russell Bryant is the Engineering Manager for the Open Source Software team at Digium, Inc. He has been a core member of the Asterisk development team since the Fall of 2004. At the first AstriCon in 2004, he was named the release maintainer for Asterisk's first major release series, Asterisk 1.0. He has since contributed to almost all areas of Asterisk development, from project management to core architectural design and development.
