Out-of-the-Box Open Source PBX Packages
The main issue with the Asterisk Open Source PBX software today is that it is fairly complex to configure and that there are a lot of components to integrate with before you can get a fairly decent working system. The original answer to this was Fonality’s Trixbox package (which is currently at version 2). Originally called Asterisk@Home. This was simply a bundling of the many open source software packages out there that build a complete, fully-functional and easy to use SoftPBX package. It works fairly well and is pretty easy to configure.
Recently, however, Digium has released their own product called AsteriskNOW. Here is some coverage from O’reilly.
Digium has released their AsteriskNOW software appliance today, which promises to drastically reduce the complexities involved in installing and running the popular open source PBX Asterisk. True to their word, Digium has released the entire package, including their new GUI front end to the complex Asterisk application, under the GPL open source license. We’re big believers in open source at O’Reilly, and it’s great to see a company like Digium walking the walk here, as there was some speculation that the GUI front end they have developed would be a proprietary product.
It is essentially the same product as Trixbox. However, the user interface of AsteriskNOW is definitely much more cleanly integrated and polished than the default FreePBX interface used by Trixbox. Apart from this, there are no major differences.
With these new offerings, the barriers to entry for getting a SoftPBX system up has now been drastically reduced. Whether it is Trixbox or AsteriskNOW, the future looks good for open source voice-over-IP.
