Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Foreword

John Todd

“There’s more than one way to do it.” I’ve been working with Asterisk for nine years, and this motto becomes more true with each release, each added feature, and each clever person who attacks a telecommunications problem with this incredibly flexible toolkit. I had the fantastic opportunity to work as the community manager for the Asterisk project at Digium for two years, which gave me one of the best vantage points for seeing the scope and imagination of the worldwide development effort pushing Asterisk forward. The depth and breadth of Asterisk is staggering—installations with hundreds of thousands of users are now commonplace. I see Asterisk making deep inroads into the financial, military, hospital, Fortune 100 enterprise, service provider, calling card, and mobile environments. In fact, there really aren’t any areas that I can think of where Asterisk isn’t now entrenched as the default choice when there is a need for a generalized voice tool to do “stuff.”

Asterisk has been emblematic of the way that open source software has changed business—and changed the world. My favorite part of any Asterisk project overview or conference talk is answering questions from someone new to Asterisk. As I continue to answer “Yes, it can do that,” I watch as the person’s eyes grow wide. The person starts to smile when he really starts to think about new things to do that his old phone or communication system couldn’t possibly have done. Radio integration? Sure. Streaming MP3s ...