PhoneValet and Phlink are answering machines with a desktop dialler. Asterisk is a fully featured telephone exchange for both POTS (plain old telephone system) and VoIP (voice over IP). .
With PhoneValet and Phlink you can replace the answering machine at home. With Asterisk on an Xserve you can run the telephone service of a small town with 10.000 people, if not more. They are simply not in the same category.
What you are talking about is CTI applications that integrate with your phone system. Since neither PhoneValet nor Phlink provide much of a service (limited access to a single analog line over a lousy USB interface that would have serious trouble with any full duplex use), their focus is on the built in CTI apps, such as a desktop dialler and call log viewer. And then of course these apps are nicely wrapped in eyecandy.
But don't let appearance mislead you. Those things exist for Asterisk, too and there is a large community working on more applications.
There is a plug in for Addressbook to dial directly from Addressbook through Asterisk and this will still work even if you are hundreds of miles away from your Asterisk server, ie when you are travelling ...
http://www.reinvented.net/labs/article/1824
There are quite a few browser based interfaces for Asterisk, too. Check out the Asterisk Wiki at http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Asterisk.
As for OSX eyecandy, we're working on an Aqua based GUI front end. The aim here was to get the server software out to the Mac community first. The GUI tools will follow in due course.
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Want less of a nuts and bolts approach? - yaboot
PhoneValet and Phlink are answering machines with a desktop dialler. Asterisk is a fully featured telephone exchange for both POTS (plain old telephone system) and VoIP (voice over IP). .With PhoneValet and Phlink you can replace the answering machine at home. With Asterisk on an Xserve you can run the telephone service of a small town with 10.000 people, if not more. They are simply not in the same category.
What you are talking about is CTI applications that integrate with your phone system. Since neither PhoneValet nor Phlink provide much of a service (limited access to a single analog line over a lousy USB interface that would have serious trouble with any full duplex use), their focus is on the built in CTI apps, such as a desktop dialler and call log viewer. And then of course these apps are nicely wrapped in eyecandy.
But don't let appearance mislead you. Those things exist for Asterisk, too and there is a large community working on more applications.
There is a plug in for Addressbook to dial directly from Addressbook through Asterisk and this will still work even if you are hundreds of miles away from your Asterisk server, ie when you are travelling ...
http://www.reinvented.net/labs/article/1824
There are quite a few browser based interfaces for Asterisk, too. Check out the Asterisk Wiki at http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Asterisk.
As for OSX eyecandy, we're working on an Aqua based GUI front end. The aim here was to get the server software out to the Mac community first. The GUI tools will follow in due course.
regards
benjamin
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Sunday, July 18 2004 @ 10:05 AM PDT