Archive for the 'Community' Category

Start Planning for your Arizona Visit in September!

beelinebill April 28th, 2008

I get the question every day, “Is Astricon happening this year?”

Make no mistake: yes. September 23-25 in Glendale, AZ.

This event is “The ONLY true Asterisk Conference” originally founded by Sokol and Associates and acquired by Digium in July, 2007. Details forthcoming next week on www.astricon.net

To respond to the second most asked question every day, “Is there a Digium Asterisk World” in Boston this year? The answer is no, there is not due to the changes at Pulvermedia. Thus, Astricon is THE conference for your Asterisk needs. Developers. Integrators. Resellers. Distributors. Newbies. Partners.

So plan now for heading to Astricon, and watch for the announcement next week with details on registration and final dates and venue information.

See you soon!

Asterisk Myth Busters - Episode 2

danny April 25th, 2008

Welcome to the second episode of Asterisk Myth Busters. In this installment, we’ll investigate a common misconception regarding the Asterisk contributors’ license agreement.

MYTH: Digium requires code contributors to give away their rights.

Contributors to any open source, GPL-licensed project willingly grant specific rights, while maintaining copyright on their contribution. Digium, as the sponsor of the Asterisk, has required from the inception of the project that contributors to Asterisk sign the contributors’ license agreement – a policy that is designed to ensure that Asterisk remains free of legal encumbrances. The purpose of this agreement is to clearly define the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed and thereby allow us to defend the project should there be a legal dispute regarding the software at some future time. While the Asterisk contributor’s license agreement does enable commercial licensing, all code contributed under this license agreement is available freely under the GPL. Digium’s commercial license revenues directly fund continued open source development. This is truly a dual licensing model, in which the use of one license does not diminish the other.

While there are those that take exception to this policy, there are precedents among other very successful open source projects that are in line with the Digium policy. For example, the Apache Software Foundation requires a signed Contributor License Agreement to be on file before an individual is given commit rights to an ASF project ( http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt ). There are also precedents with more strident legal requirements such as the Free Software Foundation’s policy which requires copyright assignment or disclaimer to accept GNU contributions ( http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Legal-Matters ). Digium is not blazing a new trail here, just working to apply best practices to the Asterisk project.

OUTCOME: Busted. Contributors keep their copyrights

Thank You Pulver. On to Astricon!

julie April 12th, 2008

Digium would like to take this opportunity to thank all the participants and exhibitors from Digium Asterisk World (DAW) in Boston (October 2007) and San Jose (March 2008). We are excited in the growing interest in the Asterisk open source telephony software and look forward to seeing you all and more attendees at our next event! We at Digium believe our experiment with DAW was a tremendous success. We are committed to Astricon.

The Digium team enjoyed working with the Pulvermedia team and wish them all the best. Digium, however, will move forward by growing AstriCon, the original and only dedicated Asterisk Open Source Telephony Conference. We hope that those who of you supported and were excited by the DAW event strategy will join us at AstriCon in Glendale, AZ in September of 2008.

Last year, we had a successful event in spite of the last minute venue changes forced by the new hotel not being ready in time. Those challenges moved us to the outskirts of the city. This year we are committed to the event and to make it better than ever! The venue is completed and committed to working with Digium to deliver a world class event. It is a great new hotel!

Dates: September 22 - 25, 2008

Venue, check it out:

Renaissance Glendale Hotel & Spa
9495 W. Coyotes Boulevard
Glendale, AZ 85305
Phone: 623-937-3700
Toll free: 1-800-Marriott

This event is open to all those companies in the Asterisk ecosystem. Because this event is designed for Asterisk community and Asterisk enthusiasts, we are expanding it to add a business track as well. As Asterisk moves mainstream, expect the usual technical track, Asterisk 101, business track, code zone for developers, resellers and integrators, and a world class slate of speakers and workshops.

Digium will sponsor and manage the event and we will encourage booth space and sponsorships to help grow the event! Our goal is to educate more people about Asterisk, advance people’s knowledge who are already using Asterisk, and share everything from best practices in open source to end user experiences.

Check out www.astricon.net next week to follow the changes which will start to occur frequently. Stay tuned. for more information on Astricon, check out the web site - give us a few days to get this work completed.

We look forward to seeing you all this year at Astricon in AZ!

AsteriskNOW! 1.0.1 Hits The Streets

ssokol February 18th, 2008

After nearly a year of cooking, AsteriskNOW! version 1.0 is ready for your dining pleasure. (So it took a year…. Blame the folks at Google. They’re the ones who made long-term beta tests popular. Some crazy idea about getting things right before they actually release them as products. Silly people.)

So, you ask, what is AsteriskNOW!? It’s a complete installation of Asterisk that doesn’t require a masters degree in Linux geekery to use. Download the image, burn it to CD, drop it in the tray, fire up the PC and 15 minutes later you’ve successfully converted an ordinary computer into an amazing telephony server with an easy-to-use web-based graphical user interface (a.k.a. the Asterisk GUI).

So, you ask, what can I do with AsteriskNOW!? Well, !?#& near anything. At least !?#& near anything that involves telephony. You can build a basic IP-PBX. You can VoIP-enable a legacy PBX. You can build a conference bridge. You can replace your ancient and limited voicemail system with a state-of-the-art Asterisk-based unified messaging system. You can make your one-man shop sound like a Fortune 500 enterprise with automated attendants (a.k.a. IVR menus). Oh, and you can do all of that from the comfort of the web GUI.

Want to take it up a notch? Ok. Dig in just a bit and you can build you own IVR system using the Asterisk Dialplan scripting language and either web-service or ODBC data sources. Want to stretch things a bit further? Learn the ways of AGI (the Asterisk Gateway Interface) and build a sophisticated voice communications application in the programming or scripting language of your choice. Feel like jumping in with both feet? Bust out your C compiler and build your own low-level applications using the Asterisk C API.

So what’s new since the last beta release? Great question:

  • Over 1000 updates and improvements to the GUI
  • Updated to Asterisk release 1.4.17
  • Updated to Zaptel release 1.4.8
  • Updated Linux Kernel 2.6.22
  • Polycom phone auto-provisioning
  • Improved package management and update capabilities

But wait…. That’s not all. This 1.0.1 version includes a few extras that aren’t part of the canonical Asterisk 1.4 release (including the Open Settlement Protocol and the phone provisioning module). Starting with the next release, AsteriskNOW! will be available in two flavors: AsteriskNOW! Pure, which contains only pure GPL and GPL compatible components and runs only the stock version of Asterisk, and AsteriskNOW! Plus, which includes non-GPL components and a limited number of features back-ported from the development version. As they say in in the burger commercials, have it your way!

One last thing: <shameless-commercial-plug>AsteriskNOW! is a great way for developers, VARs and ISVs to get started with Asterisk. Once you’ve seen the power, flexibility and feature set that makes Asterisk the most popular telephony SDK in the world, you’ll probably want to take a look at Asterisk Business Edition (ABE), which is AsteriskNOW!’s commercial counterpart. ABE uses the same simple installation, the same GUI framework and includes a range of support options and a flexible license model that make it ideal for commercial deployments.</shameless-commercial-plug>.

Digium puts its money where its mouth is….

beelinebill February 11th, 2008

Digium is putting our money where our mouth is. We are investing in total quality programs throughout the company - and today we are rolling out the new Digium Exceptional Satisfaction Program (ESP).

ESP includes:

  • Quality hardware products with “Stand behind the product” warranties.
  • Money back satisfaction guarantee.
  • Courteous and helpful service agents.

The quality mantra starts with our customers and extends to every aspect of our products and customer service. Our goal is to produce the highest quality hardware and software and to deliver the highest quality business solutions, training and support to totally satisfy our customers. Over the past year, we have re-architected nearly the entire range of PCI Telephony interface and gateway cards and introduced a wide range of PCI Express cards. We have listened to the community and our customers and now offer an echo-free guarantee. We have refined the drivers and increased performance for these cards.

Effective immediately, on all current Digium cards we have set the PCI and PCI Express Card warranty at FIVE YEARS and offer a no-risk guarantee to our customers. (See our End of Life announcements for discontinued products.) We have improved our pricing on a number of products - and redesigned our channel programs to benefit those organizations that truly partner with Digium.

Digium PCI and PCI Express cards are the best value in the market. If the cards do not work with Genuine Asterisk as advertised, our top notch technical support team will work with you to resolve the problem. If the problem can not be successfully resolved, we will refund your money. Yes, you heard it. We have always done this, but now we are promoting it and will continue to. Digium’s Hardware Appliances offer standard 1 year warranty that can be extended by renewing the subscription on your product.

100% Customer Satisfaction. Make no mistake - Digium is dead serious. As benevolent sponsor and maintainer of the open source Asterisk project, Mark Spencer’s dream has forever altered the world of communications.

- - - - - - -

What do our customers say? Here is an excerpt from one of the open source Asterisk mailing lists, one person responding to another:

I have been using 220B’s for about 6 months. I have about 20 of them out in the field. I have not had any issues with them, and feedback is positive.

Same here. I’ve been using five TE220B in my company at 5 different sites since october 2007; up to now, zero problems and no echo at all. One of the sites runs a small callcenter that handles about 1000 incoming calls per day. So far the feedback is really positive. Alberto.

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I have launched many programs over the years, and while we’ve been planning this program and launch I have received more exciting employee feedback than ever before. The hallways, coffee pot, conference rooms, and parking lot discussions are about the excitement of proving to the world that open source telephony solutions are ready for the mainstream and so is Digium! We are proud of our “Mark Spencer” heritage as the author and creator of Asterisk as well as today’s major sponsor and community steward. We have the worlds best IP PBX in Asterisk, according to Infoworld, who awarded us the “Best IP PBX” award last month to kick off 2008. World class service and people along with the best open source based IP Telephony products on the planet.

Customer Focus! Quality Products! 100% Customer Satisfaction!

Visit www.digium.com for all the details.

We look forward to serving you!

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