The one thing Asterisk has been missing
If you’re like most folk, setting up a PBX is something you’d rather avoid, especially when its an open source PBX that isn’t known for its easy configuration and installation. ISPBX aims to solve the pain with its drag-and-drop configuration tool, Cogoblue.
Drag a few phone object over to a ‘viewing pane’, add a few trunks, sprinkle in a some voicemail boxes and auto-attendants and valla! You’ve got yourself a voice network. Creating an IVR tree is about the same and an infinite number of IVR trees can be nested, says John Signorello, a partner at ISPBX.
Currently Cogoblue will not autodetect the phone configurations attached to the network, but it comes darn close. The admin needs to enter the phone’s MAC address and model number into the GUI and Cogoblue generates the necessary scripts for configuring the device. Today, the following phones are supported:
· CISCO 7960 , 7940
· LINKSYS 94X (941,942,etc)
· SNOM 360,320,300
· POLYCOM 650,601,501,301,4000
· GRANDSTREAM GXP2000.
Cogoblue is delivered with ISPBX’s range of Asterisk appliances. The Model 500 is the low-end serving 12 concurrent users and priced at $1,199. The Model 12000 is the high end serving 65 concurrent users and priced at $2,100.
MY TAKE
Kudos to ISPBX for creating an interface that will simplify PBX configuration. Customer previously put off by Asterisk’s configuration should consider ISPBX. If they don’t mind a hosted solution then Fonality will be another alternative.
It’s a shame that right now the software is limited to configuring a single server. Forget about configuring multiple offices or anything like that which is probably a good thing, says Paul Tinsley CTO of Nexcom Technologies:
“It's a product that would be a solution for a very small set of users, anything beyond the smallest branch office and this would become a major headache to manage. Trying to keep track of user extensions in a visual mapping tool goes against any modern interface design principles. It's hard to beat tabular display for large data sets, it almost feels like this is a solution looking for a problem, wrote Paul in an IM. He created the Asterisk implementation sold by Dialcon.