Asterisk Desktop Assistant – Windows Click-To-Call and More
pengler December 22nd, 2008
Digium is pleased to announce the release of Asterisk Desktop Assistant (beta), a desktop call management application for Windows PCs. Asterisk Desktop Assistant (ADA) is Digium’s first step towards offering a comprehensive Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) suite. It makes dialing and handling phone calls simpler and faster by adding click-to-call functionality into popular desktop applications. It also adds call notifications directly to the Windows desktop.
ADA is great for call-centers, sales organizations, or anyone who spends much of their time on the phone. Click-to-call integration with the Firefox web browser automatically telephony enables web based business applications. Tight integration with the Microsoft Office suite and TAPI-enabled applications empowers Asterisk-based unified communications.
ADA works by sending the phone number you wish to dial to your PBX over the Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) and initiating a call-back to your phone. When you answer the incoming call, Asterisk dials out to the number you clicked. For Microsoft Outlook users, the call pop-ups are tightly integrated with your contacts and will show their picture (if available) and display name. ADA integrates with Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Firefox, Thunderbird or any TAPI (Telephony Application Programming Interface) enabled software such as ACT!, Goldmine, etc.
The plug-ins for Office and Firefox automatically detect phone numbers in documents and web pages and make them dial-able with a mouse click. ADA’s quick-dial bar (a tiny window that can be positioned anywhere on the desktop) lets you quickly dial Outlook contacts and standard phone numbers. Just start typing the name and ADA will search your contact list and display matching names/numbers. To dial, click the contact name or just press <Enter>.
Currently ADA support requires a bit of dial plan tweaking to get started. The process is painless and will take most Asterisk system administrators only a few minutes to configure. Ultimately ADA support will be integrated into AsteriskNOW and the AsteriskGUI, and hopefully other popular user interfaces including FreePBX. Details on the configuration can be found in the Setup Guide at the link below.
The beta version of ADA is available completely free with no time or feature limits. Our goal is to gather feedback from the Asterisk user community. We’ve created a forum where you can ask questions, request feature enhancements, and post bug reports. The forum is also the home for ADA downloads while the product is in beta, so please check there for updates and documentation.
ADA Forums: http://forums.digium.com/index.php?c=8
ADA Download: http://dl1.digium.com/ADA/ADAInstall.exe
ADA Administrators Guide: http://dl1.digium.com/ADA1.1/ADA_Admin_Manual.pdf
Pete Engler
Product Manager – Desktop and Strategic Products
Will it be free in future?
We will await the beta testing feedback to determine ADA’s future packaging. We would like to hear from anyone who has suggestions regarding this on here or on the asterisk.org forums. Special arrangements can always be explored further with Digium.
Uhg! .NET
I was using the snap application to push the number to my crm application by passing the variable number to the app through the CRMs exe lookup application. Since I lost my hard drive due to corruption, I can’t get that functionality back because you purchase the snap app. Please put that functionality back in the the program. I need it bad. If I have to pay for it again, so be it.
Doug.
Also, the application is no longer cleaning up the pasted number on the dialer.
example
Cut and paste of
“(XXX) XXX-XXXX” should be cleaned up to send out “XXXXXXXXXX”
since it does not clean up the number, the (,) and _ characters get sent to Asterisk. It should also strip the blank spaces.
What’s up with that?
Doug.
What’s your plan with the ADA product? We have it installed and it works pretty okay. Was wondering if there is something as a roadmap?
Just come across this good product. Will the ADA possible to configure to pop-up a web URL by DNID (dialed number). I have done this with Asterisk Desktop Manager 1.1 but somehow rather the latest version not working with my Asterisk 1.4.12, so need to hunt for a replacement.
[...] to our readers, including FreePBX, FOP (Flash Operator Panel), A2Billing and ViciDial. Others like Asterisk Desktop Assistant and Asterisk.Net were new to me and I suspect many [...]
Will this ever be able to use a different communication method than the AMI?
As far as I can tell all that has happened is that snap – a – number has had all of it’s features removed by replacing it’s GUI with an incredibly simple one.
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