Asterix written by Mark Spencer (and others) is the leading open-source PBX. Asterix is a full-featured telephony application and is suitable for enterprise office and call-centre applications.

ATAsterisk is intended as a simple integration suite, for applications where a telephone PBX must co-operate with Plone. In this intial release, some of the most important objects in the asterisk world are represented as Archetypes content objects, and can therefore be manipulated within Plone.

About this Product

ATAsterisk is written by Salim Fadhley , and incorporates David Wilson's Python Asterisk Bindings, which provides the basic connectivity between Zope and the Asterisk manager interface. For your convenience, DW's Asterisk modules are included in the ATAsterisk software.

The initial release of the software has the following features:

• An object that represnts an Asterisk PBX. There is no limit to the number of PBXs that the system can connect to.
• An object representing an extension attached to a single Asterisk PBX. This can be associted with a single CMFMember record, in order to show that the extension belongs to a person already known to the system.
• An object representing a calling task - some process that has yet to occur.
• The system has the ability to set-up simple calls from an extension. It includes form-controller scripts for making and running dialing tasks. It can also inspect the status of an extension, and the PBX.

Getting the Code

I have not yet released any packaged version of this software, however you can find the work in progress via the Plone Collective subversion server:

https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/ATAsterisk/trunk/

For example, to check out the code, type:

svn co https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/ATAsterisk/trunk/ ATAsterisk

Project Status

This is an initial 0.01 release. The software almost certainly contains more bugs than any person can count, but has proved its worth in a number of presentations. Patches, bugfixes and criticism of this project are all welcome.

Documentation

Documentation, FAQs and updates about this software can be found on my Wiki site: http://wiki.stodge.org/index.php/ATAsterisk

About the Author

Salim Fadhley is a London based Zope/Plone developer. Salim is interested in Blogging, Podcasting, and VOIP.