Asterisk Later or Asterisk Now?
Asterisk is the world’s leading open source telephony engine and toolkit. Asterisk was created by Mark Spencer of Digium, Inc in 1999. Code has been contributed from open source coders around the world, and testing and bug-patches from the community have provided invaluable aid to the development of this software. However, would an ordinary consumer or businessman be able to install and comprehend how to configure it on his machine? If you are not a person who knows much about Linux codes, it would be quite too hard to figure out how to to install this into your PCs to be able utilize its features to reap the benefits that you would derive from it. Before we go into that, let us first probe about asterisk and why I took my time to write about it.
As I was searching for the right VoIP service and hardwares for our Virtual Assistance business, I learned about this software that had eventually changed the way telephony is right now. From a non-technical point of view, Asterisk is just a software. An open source software that could be used as a platform for the various telephony services that we could find around us. But how flexible could asterisk be? Asterisk could be used everywhere; it could be a pbx switch, a media gateway, feature/media server; it could be used in the call center just like what we intend to do and could run in a “wide variety of operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Sun Solaris and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX including many advanced features that are often associated with high end (and high cost) proprietary PBXs. Asterisk’s architecture is designed for maximum flexibility and supports Voice over IP in many protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware.”
There are so many benefits that a business could derive in using asterisk. However, it is not that easy to do. In running asterisk, if you are not an expert or very knowledgeable in inputting codes over Linux (Ubuntu 7.04 for 64bit AMD in my case), you might have a hard time compiling asterisk. Although yes, there are numerous blogs, sites, forum links that we could find on the internet to assist someone who would like to compile asterisk, an ordinary non-technical guy (business) might have a hard time compiling it. Options that a business could probably do is to hire somebody who could but it usually does not save a person a lot since maintaining asterisk or upgrading it to work in one’s telephony system would be a tantamount expense specially in running upgrades, correcting (coding) errors or else he do it himself and just waste nothing but man hour time to compile it.
It is really quite ironical that such a wonderful software that could offer a lot of benefits for lots of businesses is not that easy to compile. But I admire Mark Spencer and his team for understanding this aspect and am glad to know that they came up with several solutions for common business consumers like me and you. They introduced several plug ang play hardwares that are bundled with asterisk and on top of that provided cost-effective options for businesses in the form of extended warranties and various support gateways for all levels of technical concerns that one may encounter in using Asterisk.
Moreover, they had introduced AsteriskNOW. AsteriskNOW™ is a Software Appliance; a customized Linux distribution that includes Asterisk®, the AsteriskGUI™, and all other software needed for an Asterisk system. That made it a lot easier for us who are in business to configure Asterisk with its Graphical User Interface. It already includes all the Linux components necessary to run, debug and build Asterisk. One would no longer have to worry about complex technical aspects of upgrades, patches and unlike some other Linux distributions it no longer includes components that might compromise security or performance.
In our case, we made it run on a single PC that entirely host AsteriskNOW™. Moreover, one could now easily take advantage of AsteriskNOW™ by just simply downloading it from their website and burning it on a CD and Presto! you have all the necessary requirements needed to be able to run Asterisk.With this, businesses (SME) could now make full use of the features to be able to derive benefits that one would reap in using Asterisk through AsteriskNOW™.
The choice is yours! Asterisk NOW or Later? 
UPDATE: A book on AsteriskNow is now out written by Nir Simionovich and published by Packt Publishing. I suggest you checkout the book to learn more about AsteriskNow. A free chapter is found on their website. Follow the link, to see my review on AsteriskNow book. It should help you in the installation and configuration of the software for your enterprise.
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