Asterisk: The Future of Telephony

Colophon

About the Authors. Jim Van Meggelen is President and CTO of Core Telecom Innovations, a Canadianbased provider of open source telephony solutions. He has over 15 years of enterprise telecom experience, for such companies as Nortel, Williams, and Telus, and has extensive knowledge of both legacy and VoIP equipment from manufacturers such as Nortel, Cisco, and Avaya.

Jim was the architect of two of the world’s largest managed enterprise voice networks, each solution serving roughly 20,000 users in more than 1,000 communities across Canada and providing telecommunications in 5 different languages through 6 time zones, administered completely from a central location. These networks pioneered the use of extensive automation and database control in a branch voice network—functionalities not generally available in proprietary telecommunications systems. Jim has now moved on from the world of proprietary telecom, and is commited to open source telephony.

Jim is one of the principal contributors to the Asterisk Documentation Project. He enjoys teaching, public speaking, improvisational acting, and writing.

Jared Smith is one of those rare individuals whose beloved hobby is the same as his profession. The son of a computer store owner, Jared wrote his first computer program at the age of 7 on his Commodore 64. The obvious choice of major for this geek-in-embryo was Computer Engineering, and Jared received his Bachelor of Science degree with a minor in Computer Science from Utah State ...