Egressive has installed a new PBX on one of our customer sites. The PBX runs an open source software product called Asterisk, which provides full PBX functionality including

• Voicemail
• Voice Menus
• Analogue and Voice over IP (VOIP)
• Call queuing and ring groups
• Call transfers, forwarding, parking and call waiting

Asterisk is extremely powerful and flexible, and these are just a few of the features that it can provide. It can be used in a single person office that only have an Internet connection, through to companies with large offices in multiple locations.

We used a hardware product from the Free Telephony Project called the IP04 for the PBX unit (the first time we have used open source software on open source hardware). This is a fantastic unit. Completely solid state, it only measures 220mm x 130mm x 40mm. The unit itself is silent - there are no fans or disk drives. It is very flexible - this particular unit was configured for 3 incoming analogue lines and one internal line, but the four slots can have any combination of these, including no analogue lines if you are just going to utilise VOIP. The old analogue PBX we were replacing was about 25 times larger than the IP04 - the IP04 now uses the old PBX case as a convenient shelf.

This IP04 has an analogue line configured for the fax machine (actually a photocopier/ scanner/ fax machine), but all of the staff handsets have been replaced with SNOM 300 Voice over IP units. These were recommended to us by Nicegear, and we have been very impressed with the quality and ease of setup of the SNOM phones.

Should the customer take on additional staff, add some more extensions, or require additional services from their new PBX, they can just do it - there are no extra license fees to worry about or annoying license codes to obtain. And because this is built with open hardware and open source software, there is a huge choice of handsets and other devices that they can integrate into the system if required.