[cisco-voip] Asterisk..

[Jeffrey C. Ollie]

On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 17:35 -0500, Marc Hering wrote:
> Ok I'm a little confused...Is Asterisk something that allows Linux to
> act as a "Call Manager"  or does it allow a Linux box to run as a
> "Gateway"

Asterisk can do a lot.  Someone else posted a feature list.  Basically
Asterisk is Call Manager + Unity + IPCC all rolled into one.  Of course,
depending on your perspective, some features may work better or worse on
one platform or the other.

One drawback to Asterisk is that it's much more of a do-it-yourself
project.

On the bonus side, Asterisk beats the pants off of everything else on
price.

>    If it does both does it support the Cisco handsets?  (Most noteably
> the 7960)

There are basically two ways to get a 7960 to talk to Asterisk:

1) Load the SIP image onto the 7960.  The SIP images can be downloaded
from CCO but to be legal you may need to send some money to Cisco for a
license.

2) Compile SCCP support into Asterisk.  From what I've seen the SCCP
support in Asterisk is spotty (both feature-wise and stability-wise).

I personally load SIP on phones that need to talk directly to an
Asterisk server.

>   and can it interact with a CCM?

Yes, if you have CCM 4.0 or greater you can use SIP trunks in CCM to
talk to Asterisk (I do this and it works great).  Or if you can get
H.323 support compiled into Asterisk you can use H.323 trunks.

Jeff

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