Asterisk gets a GUI

When I met with the guys from Digium this past fall, the conversation turned to the barriers that their Asterisk open-source IP PBX faced in gaining market acceptance. They were rightly proud that Asterisk could do pretty much anything that a legacy PBX could do. All you needed was a properly configured preferences file. But as typical for a legacy telecom product or a Linux application, those preference files are long, complex, and finicky in ways that could prove unexpected and unwelcome. That's a big problem in the SMB market, which Asterisk hopes to make its mark, because most SMBs don't have telecom or Linux heads around. Digium this week announced AsteriskNOW, a customized Linux distro that includes Asterisk, supporting software, and a graphical user interface to ease setup so mere mortals will be able to administer their PBX the way they're used to using any other software tool. They say you'll be able to configure Asterisk in under 30 minutes. About time, too.

For more information about AsteriskNOW:
- read this website from Digium

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