Asterisk is an open source application on telephony applications and a full-featured call-processing server. It’s is one of the last technology that has been in existence too long that the open source group has touched on.

There has been and open source web server (Apache), mail server (qmail, sendmail, postfix etc), proxy server (squid), CMS (joomla, wordpress), streaming media (icecast) but never, until now, has anyone every tried offering voice application to the open.

Good thing about Asterisk is that it can be used as a stand alone, Asterisk-Only system, or it can integrate with an existing PBX system.

Features of Asterisk Open Source PBX

Asterisk has tons of feature that could take my whole day listing and explaining them here. Let’s just say that everything you ever knew about PBX capabilities are also in Asterisk.

Let’s list a couple for example’s sake:

• Call Forward
• Call Forward on Busy
• Call Forward on No Answer
• Call Monitoring

• Call Parking
• Call Queuing
• Call Recording
• Call Retrieval
• Call Transfer
• Call Waiting
• Caller ID
• Caller ID Blocking
• Supervised Transfer
• Talk Detection
• Text-to-Speech (via Festival)
• Three-way Calling
• Time and Date

And tons more!! You can check all the features here if you’re interested.